Stop Light With a Progress Bar to End Road Rage

Nope, nope NOPE! These are BAD! What you introduce are people who will advance that last few ticks. In Thailand they have yellow->red and red->yellow->green, and people would always go before green. Maybe being red will help this, but i still think its a bad idea. Just like the previous person too.

Right?
What a dumb idea, this will only lead to drag racing

I think it's a cool idea, but was also thinking that what Smochina said could be a reality!!!

there are a lot of instances where I see a red go to green, and then one last car races through the intersection a moment later. I have always learned to look for some idiot pushing the light before I take off at a fresh green. With lights like these people are more likely to time it and hit the gas right when it changes to green or a moment early which can spell disaster when you combine the early green starter with the pushing the red guy. Generally I like the idea, but I see it causing more issues than it fixes considering the idiots on the road today. Oh, and how the hell did something that simple take 3 years to develop???

How it works is pretty cool, but putting these on the street will get people killed.

Drag racing? Yeah, 'cause that doesn't happen now.

Gimme a break. All you have to do is look at the cross traffic light and watch it turn red. Not like this wasn't an issue before this thing existed.

And I second excalibur...how the hell did this take three years of development?

would have made more sense to make it an hourglass, so people won't expect it to turn back to green

Oh yeah, surely this did not take 3 years to develop? Must have been government funded!

I think its a good idea in concept, but wont be practical. One because of drag racing. and two because alot of lights are on a sensor which detect cars in the opposite direction and will vary the duration of the light on each side depending on traffic. Imagine walking across the street when its at the beginning of the red light and then a car comes on the other side and suddenly the light changes to green.

I couldn't agree more!

This new light will give a lot of "I'm in to much of a hurry to care about others" people an excuse to jump the gun.

The end result will be more accidents with vehicles getting broadsided and pedestrians getting hit cause they're concentrating more on the light than on whether the road is clear when they go.

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I see too many people creeping into the intersection, anticipating the light changing well before it even changes. The stupid thing is they don't even pay attention to the light change sequence even though they drive through the same intersection on a daily basis.

Locally, the lights are staggered so instead of both sides of an intersection facing each other going at the same time, one side gets the green about 10 to 20 seconds after the other side. Then both sides stay green until the end of the set period.

Progress bars are already in place. Look at the adjacent crosswalk sign for pedestrians. That will give you an accurate time of when the light will go green.

Modern traffic lights run on sensors which vary their timing. All new lights do this, making this device useless. How about - let a life and have patience for up to 30 seconds

Three years? What?

You could make this in an evening with some LEDs, resistors and a bread board.

you can see the opposing lights turning from green to yellow to red 99% of the time anyway. So what's the point? You go through the same lights on a daily basis, you already KNOW how long they last...

They "creep" into the intersection under some misguided thought that it will make the light change faster. People have all sorts of thoughts without a clue how lights really work. I actually had a guy tell me once that if you drive through town with your headlights on, clicking your bright lights off and on, the lights will change for you as you approach them. I simply agreed with him and never told him any different. This was years ago, and I still can picture him today driving around town clicking his bright lights off and on.
Too funny!!

You guys obviously have no concept of a product cycle. This is a public safety device that hangs out in the street and is expected to have extreme reliability. It probably took 2 weeks to make the prototype, 2 months to test it with various studies. Then any flaws had to be corrected and all the tests run over again. Then comes the actual manufacturing which take 6-8 months to create a reliable process, and the first unit must go enviromental, vibration, high voltage (lightning)testing. All this testing is done by the manufacturer first, before they have a product to send to the government testing. Hopefully there were no kickbacks from the government testing causing the entire process to start over. Also realize the government labs have a long list of products waiting for their turn to test. It's actually amazing something doesn't take longer.

I'm going to disagree with you all, and say this is a great idea. Blah blah drag strip. I wouldn't mind knowing when the light was going to change. As it is, i monitor the light of the other direction to see when it will change so I am prepared.

If the progress bar for this traffic light is anything like the progress bar for transferring a file in Windows there's going to be a lot of angry people...

"10 seconds...5 seconds...a few- TWO MINUTES!?!?!?"

I don't think it'll be as bad as what people here say. Red to Green is a big enough incentive to drag race. The countdown will only make those that already drag race continue to drag race. I think it's a good idea.

Time will tell.

Countdowns were installed all around the center of Targu-Mures, Romania. It's the past for us now, and it's the future for you? To be honest, I thought Romania was always a few steps behind, not forward.

This might be good, might be bad I just do not know. Either way the company or companies that make these will probably charge cities a butt load of money just get them which the cost in turn will be passed down to us everyday joes and janes. Oh and they will say that it will be beneficial the public safety (how they determine that before it is released on a people I just don't get either).

Nice idea. There are potential problems, like some people using it to drag race, but I think people will focus too much on the red light and forgo looking at the traffic in the cross direction. They'll focus on the red light and when it turns green, just go without watching.

It's not going to create new problems, as those already happen, but I think it might make them more frequent. Putting those lights at the long long reds might be good, but don't put them everywhere.

really though ... anyone with experience behind the wheel can watch the adjacent lights and learn how they work so that once it turns red then your light will turn green ... but as far as using a red count down timer around the red light i think its a neat idea, so lets spend all of our government tax dollars on that instead of providing more funds to our kids schools to give them a better education ...by the time they graduate they wont even know what a light bulb is

Hope the progress bar applies also to the Green light, so we'll know how much time we still have to beat the red light!

Yeah, I agree that having a count-down for the light change is a bad idea. It would be better to have a count-down on the green and yellow lights. When a light changes to green, I always pause and look both ways to make sure someone isn't going to run the red (a practice that has saved me from more than a couple of accidents).

Insofar as road rage is concerned, in my experience this is almost always caused by inconsiderate drivers. People who change lanes suddenly without signaling, people who merge onto the highway travelling 35MPH, people who change lanes into the far right lane at a stop light just because it's open but who are not turning right--meanwhile a line of cars forms behind that car who would have liked to take advantage of the green arrow, people who get on a multi-lane highway and don't yield the far left lane to vehicles wishing to pass, etc. This far from a comprehensive list. The point being that road-rage would probably be a very rare occurence if drivers were more considerate of others on the road.

It'd be easy to make a snide remark like "good thing he didn't try to develop this in only two years" but I agree with gubment about the reasons why it probably took a long time.

Also we should keep in mind that the success of a product like this is going to depend a great deal on the driving culture of the region where it is installed. As an example, there's a reason why roundabouts/rotaries work well in England and not in the US. A properly used roundabout can make a road much more fuel efficient. A poorly used one is worse than a traffic light.

Finally, in response to some of the comment about road rage, it is NOT caused by other drivers who are slow. Every driver has a choice of how they will respond to traffic, stress, lights, other drivers, etc.

I'm another who thinks this is an idea worth trialing. People will be people, it doesn't matter what you do there will always be assholes. We have the standard red light but it doesn't prevent people from ever inching forward into the pedestrian walk path. We have indicators in our cars for lane changing and turns, but it doesn't prevent people from ever using them. We have a pass/fast (left lane for the DUH! crowd) lane but it doesn't prevent people from using them to cruise below the speed limit while talking on the phone. I can go on and on, me thinks you get the picture.

HAHAHA, yeah, I can totally see the potential of drag racing on every street in America. Although I can also see sooo many people getting busted for it. My initial reaction upon reading the headline, though, was that it is actually a genius idea that could work really well. Until I started reading comments about drag racing up and down this thread, at which point I realized that it is very likely to happen