SoylentNews

"exec" writes:

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