Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday October 24 2019, @11:34AM (2 children)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Thursday October 24 2019, @11:34AM (#911175) Journal

    I know how fast I'm going. I know how far I am from the intersection. Duration of the yellow light is the missing variable. If they aren't consistent, and I don't want to risk a ticket, then logically I have to assume that they are all 2 seconds or whatever the minimum is. So I might have to stop abruptly and have everything in my car that isn't nailed down go flying and risk being rear-ended.

    Ideally there would be a series of lights or a countdown preceeding the red light to remove all uncertainty.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @01:17PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @01:17PM (#911195)

    Yup, IMO this should be handled at the federal level.

    Yellow duration = f(speed limit)

    I don't know what f() should be and I don't want to risk being sued for claiming to be an engineer.

    Crap! Did I just claim to be a legislator by proposing what a law should be?

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 24 2019, @11:19PM

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday October 24 2019, @11:19PM (#911418) Journal

      It's okay, they won't worry about a minnow like you while there's a much, much bigger fish to catch. There's this crazy criminal dude who has misrepresented himself as President of the United States.