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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 23 2019, @08:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the there-goes-the-revenue dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

After Mats Järlström lost an initial legal challenge in 2014, a federal judge in January this year ruled Oregon's rules prohibiting people from representing themselves as engineers without a professional license from the state are unconstitutional.

And now Järlström's calculations and advocacy have led the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) to revisit its guidelines [PDF] for the timing of traffic signals. As a result, yellow lights around the globe could burn for longer – ITE is an international advisory group with members in 90 countries.

Järlström discovered a problem with the timing of traffic lights in Beaverton, Oregon, after his wife Laurie received a $260 ticket for a red light violation from an automated traffic light camera in 2013.

Järlström, who studied electrical engineering in Sweden, challenged the ticket, arguing the timing interval for yellow lights fails to account for scenarios like a driver entering an intersection and slowing to make a turn. A slightly longer interval, he argued, would allow drivers making turns on a yellow light to exit intersections before the light turned red. Even a small timing increase would help – the automatically generated ticket in this case was issued 0.12 seconds after the light turned red.

When Järlström brought the issue to the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying, the state board opened an investigation in 2015 and fined him $500 the following year for practicing engineering without a professional license.

Thanks to the assistance of the Institute for Justice, a legal advocacy organization focused on limiting the scope of government, Järlström has won not only the right to refer to himself as an engineer, a refund of the surveying board fine (though not the ticket penalty), and the removal of the moving violation from his car insurance premium, but also the opportunity to fix a formula that has governed traffic light timing since 1960.

Since the injunction prohibiting Oregon from enforcing its unconstitutional speech restriction, Järlström has been working with other engineers and advocates to change the way traffic lights work. Over the summer, an ITE panel met to hear arguments along those lines and last month it agreed light timing should be reconsidered.

Have any of the soylentils here noticed shorter yellow lights at intersections after red light cameras have been installed?

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @09:33PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @09:33PM (#910999)

    In this neck of the woods, as long as you enter the intersection before the light turns red you're all good. Doesn't matter if the light is red when you're in the intersection, as long as it wasn't red when you enter it.

    This is not an engineering problem, it is a common sense problem. Fucking propeller heads.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @09:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @09:44PM (#911004)

    In the last state where I bothered to check the law was that your car had to be fully within the intersection (i.e. rear bumper having cleared the perpendicular-to-travel line of the curb corners) by the time the light turned red, not just having entered the intersection. I would think that the camera should have to prove that (akin to a horse race finish camera, but having exited the line...) But I know it doesn't work that way in practice.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Wednesday October 23 2019, @09:46PM (3 children)

    by Mykl (1112) on Wednesday October 23 2019, @09:46PM (#911005)

    Me too. Makes much more sense to be able to enter the intersection on an amber/yellow light, and safely complete your transition / turn / whatever. Let me get this right - if you enter the intersection at the start of the light sequence, and traffic prevents you from being able to turn until after the light goes red, you get fined? What does that do to the behaviour of the driver when the light turns amber? Risky behaviour!

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 23 2019, @10:27PM (1 child)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday October 23 2019, @10:27PM (#911017)

      The "reasoning" is similar to anti-gridlock laws: if you can't get out of the intersection, do not enter the intersection.

      Doesn't make the reasoning right, but it does make the fines easier to collect.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @04:16AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @04:16AM (#911110)

        The anti-gridlock laws are about queuing across the intersection, which means coming to a stop in the intersection, not just rolling through it slowly after the light has gone red.

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday October 24 2019, @03:56PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday October 24 2019, @03:56PM (#911242)

      Let me get this right - if you enter the intersection at the start of the light sequence, and traffic prevents you from being able to turn until after the light goes red, you get fined?

      If this was how they did things in Milwaukee, they'd be able to collect all kinds of ticket revenue. There are several different intersections near my daily commute route where it's normally physically impossible to turn left in a timely manner if you don't have a green arrow (one intersection in particular, they actually *removed* the turn arrow during construction this year, which was moronic)--you pull up, there is a constant stream of oncoming traffic, light turns yellow, 3 more oncoming cars go, light turns RED, maybe one more car goes, THEN you finally can complete your turn.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @04:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @04:06PM (#911251)

    Sense of any kind is not welcome when there is a chance to extract revenue.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @06:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @06:21PM (#911310)

    In this neck of the woods, as long as you enter the intersection before the light turns red you're all good. Doesn't matter if the light is red when you're in the intersection, as long as it wasn't red when you enter it.

    Same here, however we have a related rule which is rarely followed, which says that when making a left turn you must not enter an intersection behind someone else waiting to make the same left turn. So in the somewhat common case where three cars are in the intersection waiting to make a left turn and they all go once the light turns red, only the front car is actually following the rules here: it could reasonably be argued that the other two ran the light.