I nearly always do, because the “drivers” in my area are largely incompetent idiots who think a yellow light a block away means “speed up”, and running red lights is very common here. The downtown area is also such a maze of streets switching between one-way and two-way on whim that it’s not unusual for someone to get horribly confused and end up driving the wrong way for that section of street.
QFT, both of you.
Interesting question that I had to think about a bit, because much of driving behaviour is subconscious. For me, I think the answer is that there are two different circumstances.
Case #1 is if I’m the first car at the intersection when the light turns green. In that case I always quickly look both ways for any random idiot who may have been trying to rush through the yellow light at supersonic speeds.
Case #2 is when the light is already green and traffic is flowing. In that case I don’t explicitly look, but just have what I can only describe as enhanced situational awareness where my peripheral vision is more alert than usual as I approach the intersection.
This seems similar to what the Southwest pilots were doing – cleared to land, everything normal, but WTF is this moving object I just caught out of the corner of my eye that isn’t supposed to be there? They reacted before the actual runway incursion when a closer look made it clear that this bizjet just wasn’t going to stop.
I’ll mention that I’ve been given this scenario in the simulator a number of times. Usually it’s while performing an instrument procedure that’s intended (from the instructor’s POV) to end in a missed approach, they’ll program up a jet crossing the runway or sitting on the threshold waiting to take off.
It’s very effective - you’ve been focusing on the instrument approach and suddenly there’s a plane right where you’re trying to land. You don’t expect that in the simulator. Or at least, I wasn’t the first time.
One of the issues with individuals is that they are generally not aware of the errors of omission that they make.
Everyone who thinks they always look both ways when first at a red light that turns green is wrong. They look, except on the occasions they don’t and didn’t notice that they didn’t. Nothing in human task performance is 100%. Habits are not foolproof.
A lot of the motivation for two pilots and a lot of the motivation for the ritualistic canned conversation between them is about ensuring that the inevitable errors of omission are only going to proceed to fruition after both pilots forget the same thing at the same time, and both fail to notice the other’s forgetting. That still doesn’t get the error rate to zero. But when applied diligently in a standardized fashion it drops the error rate to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be.
You’re absolutely right. I described what I almost always do, but there have been thoughtless exceptions. The absolute worst offender is described by three words: In A Hurry (IAH), possibly the cause of more accidents than any other single factor. I’m talking about car accidents but as you well know it also applies to aviation (e.g.- Tenerife) and even to spacecraft (e.g.- Challenger).
Sorry no. Not only do I always look both ways as the 1st person at a light I will slow down and look going through a blind intersection if nobody is in front of me already moving through the intersection. I’ve avoided (2) side-impact crashes in the last 15 years. Ironically 1 of them was the local police.
Not looking left/right is the same for me as not flaring when landing.
Not to imply that I didn’t make mistakes as a pilot.
What’s the biggest one you feel comfortable talking about?
Tuning in the wrong frequency on the night of 9/11.
There’s no human endeavor that’s foolproof, but adopting a habit (even an imperfect one) of looking before driving through intersections adds one more low-cost layer to the swiss cheese model.
To make the visual check more reliable, pointing and calling is a technique that’s in use in some industries:
I’m kind of surprised to learn that it hasn’t been formally adopted in commercial aviation, especially for navigating across busy airfields.
Just aspiring Olympic athletes ‘going for the gold’ 
It seems to me that safety could be greatly improved by adding a delay of a few seconds from the time one light turns red to when the next light turns green.
It seems to me that there’s always someone speeding into the intersection on an “orange” light, that you’d hit if you proceed immediately when your light turns green. I don’t really blame that other drive; I blame the traffic light system for not allowing a reasonable margin for the last car to enter before another light turned red, to clear the intersection, before the light turns green for someone coming in from another direction.
Which encourages further red light running. There will be plenty who will use the gap to push their entry into the intersection right up to the green in the other direction just like they’re doing now.
Those delays are already commonly implemented…and red-light runners are aware of these delays and routinely blast through intersections long after the light has turned red.
Yes, but a commercial airline drops out of the sky and lands at speeds up to 160 MPH, so looking both ways won’t help if his plane is rolling slowly across the runway as it comes into his field of vision. His clearance is dependent upon the controller to whom he should be listening very attentively.
I’m a big fan of the Smithsonian channel’s “Air Disasters” and, after having viewed all of the 100-something episodes, I’m very familiar with the various things that can go wrong. In cases involving runway incursions, the causes I saw were reduced nighttime vision with poor lighting, fog, severe rain, poor markings, etc. Not one of the disasters fitting this category were in broad daylight on a clear day. This is a case of severe pilot error.
It’s actually mostly unconscious awareness of the delay. When they make such changes, safety is improved, but it’s usually only for a short time. After a while, accident rates go back to where they were before.
The same thing happened when they required cars to have a third brake light. Highways became safer because drivers could often see that the car two in front of them was slowing. But before long, drivers were leaving less space between them and the car in front, so the accident rate went right back up to what it was before.
That’s exactly how it works. The delay is effective in the case of drivers who inadvertently drive through too late on a yellow light, or perhaps because of weather conditions can’t stop in time. It does absolutely nothing to protect against idiots who just don’t want to stop. The only protections there, besides police patrols, are (a) red light cameras and warning signs, and (b) the alertness of other drivers.
Here in Sacramento, at least, and as far as I have any memory of ever seeing, the one light turns green at the same moment another turns red.
I don’t know how much practical difference it would make, but there certainly is a legal difference between someone going into an intersection while the light is yellow, and going in once it is solidly red.
If so, then consider this:
Which is why red light cameras work that way. I’ve never seen a traffic light system where there isn’t a delay before one side turns green after the other side turns red. If there wasn’t a delay, you could have two cars moving across from each other in the intersection, both of them technically having entered the intersection legally.
A police officer might, as a matter of judgment, write a traffic citation to someone running a yellow light who clearly had been able to stop, but this is a murkier area that depends on the laws of the specific jurisdiction and is harder to prove.
I know that I have watched some of the lights change here in Sacramento, and saw one light turn green at the same moment that the other light turned red. No delay. I have seen this and taken notice of it, multiple times.
If I have ever seen a light that had that delay, I didn’t take notice of it.