Red Light in NJ

I wish they'd do this in NYC too. The yellows are definately faster. I think we're the king of RLC's nationwide. Seems like every ten blocks there's another RLC.

The story deals with the problem of yellow light timing, not the presence of the cameras. There was no real criticism of the cameras themselves in the story.

There are standard time intervals for traffic lights and those standards have to be met. If a municipality or a camera company is knowingly shortening the interval for yellow lights, they should be held accountable in court. Just as a motorist should be held accountable if they cannot conform to traffic laws.

But in the case of companies shortening the yellow signal for obvious reasons, the penalties should be huge - to discourage them from EVER doing that again.

Fred

I don't have a problem with the red light cameras. I have a problem with the short yellow lights.

Because of the unreliability with the yellow light time intervals these days at red light camera intersections, the "solution" might be to simply treat a yellow light as equivalent to a red light--if the issue of a fine is pre-eminent. The issue of safety or other things could complicate things, however.

cities have or had ordinances that did exactly that

Traffic light controllers are not real sophisticated devices and many of them only count in full increments so a 4.3 seond calculated time cn only be set in the hardware as either 4 or 5 seconds. Standard rounding rules thell you if it is less than half, you round down to 4 seconds.

If you want the timing to be truly accurate, you may need to be ready to fork over millions to replace equipment that's still functionable.

Assuming that the 4.3 (in the example above) was calculated, then for fairness sake, I would think that the input should be 5 rather than 4.3 such that the yellow timing would match or exceed calculated requirements.

I'm all for red light cams. I know of many intersections where routinely multiple cars blow the lights. I witnessed earlier in the week someone trying to complete a left turn (light already changed to red), and someone barreled through the intersection and just about clipped the vehicle. The problem is, the vehicle turning left is always wrong. Put a RLC in there, and the behavior stops, once people are aware of the cams.

However, I personally drove through one of the aforementioned locality's RLCs mentioned in the article, and the yellow was awfully quick. I went through on green and saw yellow and red. 3 cars proceeded after me--no flash that I could see. Did they turn the cams off, or are they ignoring the pics?

Again, my position is, even if the program is not suspended, produce a pic of my car having not reached the stop line when the light turned red. It's physically impossible. But in my estimation, the yellow was about 2/3 as long as I would have thought, just using common sense.

If you are presented with the option to either pay the IRS 4 million or 5 million because the taxed owed was 4.3 million, which would you do?

The controller is set by a person and if they follow the "rules" for rounding, then the tendency is to round down rather than up.

Those are "mathematical" rules.

What we need is longer yellows so that people don't slam on their brakes at lights & cause rear end accidents!

Fred

Yes, but it's better to think out the problem in some detail & make wise choices.

Fred

My statement was

Being a mathematician of sorts, I understand what you are saying about rounding.

However, my feeling is that a yellow light should never have a timing that is less than what would be the minimum calculated value. Thus, if the person who inputs the value into the controller knows the rules by which the controller will round to an integer (in your example), that person should adjust the "calculated" value to the next higher integer before inputting it to the controller.

I would hope the engineer got this right. In engineering there are tolerances for things like this and hopefully it is marked to always round up in whatever manual the traffic engineer wrote!

When was the last time you saw an engineer out in the hot sun with 27 pieces of test equipment slinging a screwdriver and two hammers making service calls?

Never. But hopefully he got it right in the manual he wrote and hopefully they guys with the hammers follow that manual. I'm not saying mistakes can't be made, and timings can't be mis-entered, but rather that if engineered properly, the lights should be set to round up instead of down (or mathematically).

I hope they stop them. Its just crooks digging in our pockets.