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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
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 23 2019, @11:34PM (2 children)
Yes. I've actually done some limited research on this in the past. As another poster pointed out, the city makes a claim that "we didn't shorten the yellows, we just met "standards". The standards include choices from x.x seconds of yellow minimum, to y.y seconds of yellow maximum. ALL red light cams are adjusted to the minimum.
Worse, when revenue falls off, some cities have been proven to shorten that yellow an extra tenth of a second, or even two tenths, to get the money they are "losing".
Worse yet, some of those adjustments are handed off to the contractor, instead of city employees.
No red light camera can be assumed to be legitimate. They are all money making schemes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @06:32AM
"ALL red light cams are adjusted to the minimum."
So red light cameras actually make us less safe because they encourage cities to reduce yellow light times to collect more revenue and reducing yellow light times increases risk.
It should be a requirement that if a city decides to place a red light camera at a specific intersection that the yellow light times for those specific intersections should be placed at the maximum. After all, if the purpose of the red light cameras is to reduce risk for high risk intersections shouldn't the city also reduce risk by raising yellow light times at those intersections instead of lowering them?
The argument that the red light cameras are intended to make us safer is destroyed when you consider that cities choose the minimum yellow light times for intersections that have these cameras.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 24 2019, @10:31PM
I was somewhat shocked and disgusted, but not too surprised, to learn that policing expanded greatly with the advent of the automobile, and the top reason was revenue rather than public safety and order. The red light camera is merely the most recent scheme. Speed traps, didn't come to a complete stop at the stop sign, didn't stop at the stop sign and then again at the actual intersection, parking enforcement, parking meters with clocks that run too fast, etc.
I checked out an intersection, and yeah, they cheat. According to the city, it was supposed to have a yellow of 4.0 seconds, which is still too short for a 40 mph speed zone, but it was actually 3.9 seconds. Their official standard set the duration too short, and then they even cheated on that.
Cities have been busted too many times for shortening the yellow. Now what they do is find traffic lights that already have too short a yellow, and install the cameras there. That way they can state that they didn't shorten the yellow. That it still is too short for other reasons somehow is brushed aside.