No, that’s not what I said. I said that the time between when the light turns yellow and when it turns red is short enough that some cars are neither able to stop in time nor to make it through the light without hitting red while still in the intersection. If the light is yellow for a longer time, then it comes on earlier in relation to when the light turns red, so many a driver will be farther from the red light when the light turns yellow, and will have a longer stopping distance. And the ones that are within the unsafe stopping distance will still have time to get through the intersection before the light changes from yellow to red.
Or the light is not timed sufficiently to match the speed limit on the road, which is the most likely scenario in my experience. There were certain lights in Winnipeg where this was obviously the case, where with the traffic all going the speed limit (and some exceeding it as they always will), it was not safe to slam on the brakes to avoid going through the light because of the great likelihood that someone behind you would be speeding up to make it through. The solution in my opinion would be to extend the length of the yellow light so that it was apparent while the driver was further back and had time to stop safely.
Yes, and that is dependent on how long the light stays yellow. If the light turns yellow for two seconds, you could be too close to the intersection to stop safely, but also too far away to avoid hitting the red light in the intersection.
I have never in my life seen a light turn yellow and not be able to either stop in time, or make it through the intersection before it turned red. Never.
There are many times when I could have stopped but didn’t since I knew I would clear or mostly clear the intersection before it turned red. But that was my choice. Not because of the timing of the light.
That is not what I quoted you saying. I’ll quote you again:
That is wrong.
I’ve been driving for 25 years and have traveled extensively in many states and like Fugazi posted above, I’m not ever encountering these lights.
If it’s not safe to stop when the light turns yellow due to your relation to the intersection and speed you’re traveling, you keep going. No one is expecting you to slam on your brakes. If the light turns red so fast (I’m not buying this) that it happens while you’re in the middle of the intersection, then so be it. There’s no law that I’m aware of that says a light can’t turn red before you’ve made it across an intersection. If you get ticketed, video tape the length of the yellow and fight it in court.
No, it’s dependent on when the light turns yellow and the speed of the vehicle.
Yes I have come to believe that this is exactly right.
The cops themselves are basically feeding oppurtunisticly. What pisses me off is that for miles and miles on this same road the speed limit is 35mph. So the standard that was posted earlier (so many fractional seconds per mph) does apply to *this *light, but not the others.
I don’t understand how adjusting the interval on one yellow-red somehow fits into some vastly complex system that allows traffic to flow smoother. I call bullshit. Adjust the amount a time a light is actually red or green? Tha’ts fine I can understand that. But not this situation. Not at all.
I have no sympathy for the OP. I am 100% any and all predatory traffic policing, particularly at busy intersections.
No one has brought it up yet, but my experience at many intersections where traffic is steady/heavy is that there is almost always one person who barely makes it through without officially running the red light . . . and then there’s one to three others who follow right through the red light. The window of being ‘forced’ to run a red light is so small as to be non-existent. It happens, but my guess is that the cops are pulling people over who ‘think they can make it through’ or ‘think that if I keep going and follow that guy in front of me, well, it’s too late to stop now so I get a freebie.’
For every person I see cruise through at 35mph just before/as the light changes to red, I probably see 10 people eek through at slow speeds, and/or who end up stopped partially in the intersection and then pretend like it’s not their fault. Ticket 'em all. And, if shortening the yellow is some nefarious plan to catch these folks (not that I believe it is), good. I’m sick of traffic in my direction being unable to drive through greens because assholes from the other direction are taking up the first 2 seconds of my time pushing their own asses through a red light.
In my defensive driving class in 1986, the concept of the “Stale Green” was introduced. The Stale Green is a green light that has been observed to be green for a long period of time. So long that it is expected that in a short time, the light would turn yellow, then red. Knowing this, and being a good defensive driver, when encountering a stale green, one would take their foot off the gas and prepare for a yellow.
And timing with a stop watch is problematic as the difference you’re measureing is .5 seconds and even if you are anticipating, your reaction time might be as much as .18 seconds, so you could be off +/- .36 seconds, more than 50% of the time you are trying to measure. You would be better off filming the light, then post processing the recording to measure the duration.
My experience exactly. And it is astonishing to see how their behavior changes when a red light camera is put in. Once they get an expensive ticket or two they start treating the yellow with more respect. This happened all the time at the intersection near me, now it hardly ever happens.
I can agree with people who zoom through intersections on clear, sunny days with nice dry pavement. But that is not how it went down with me. On the day I was driving it was snowing at a pretty good clip, and there was an .5" of snow accumulation. The roads were slick, and I was in a group of traffic where we were all going around the same speed. The police told me later that in the past hour he had clocked over 100 people driving around 30-31mph. If you look at this light its kind of funky. The way it is set up is that the red light is actually used for a “Michigan Left” because from my area intersections don’t have a left turn lane. THe driver must go past the road that he wants to turn left staying to the left. Shortly, there is a turn-around and sometimes there is a light there. It regulates the traffic for people wanting to make a “Michigan Left”. However, there is an additional “gotcha” here. If you look at my link there is a side-street that butts up to the main street that I was on, and if you look closely there is a white line that runs perpendicular to the street. A “do not pass this line” line as it were. So in my case with the weather, the road, the traffic and all of this having an effect on making the decision to stop it was too fast of an interval for all of that info to be processed. I remember seeing the light flip to yellow, and then glancing in all my mirros and then seeing that damn white line, and thinking “oh shit I can’t stop in front of that line” and by then it was too late to try and stop on that slippery road.
If the lights are as sophisticated as they are claimed to be then they need to take weather conditions into account.