Traffic-light plague sweeps UK: Safety culture strangles Blighty

[danielf]

Originally Posted by Rob

There seems to be an increasing trend for pedestrian crossings to no longer be Pelican, i.e. flashing amber, but instead to have a complete cycle of everyone waiting going nowhere when the average pedestrian has long since crossed and is already 20 yards down the road I can't see any real benefit to safety, and it certainly isn't green as we all sit longer with our engines running.

One thing to keep in mind is that the timing for traffic lights needs to consider the slowest pedestrians. It may well be that your average 20 year old is 20 yards down the road by the time the signal changes, but that time may just be sufficient to cross the road for a 70 year old. Traffic lights can't sense how long it'll take people to cross the road (yet), so you need to presume they will be slow.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Yes but the flashing amber light was to allow those who needed more time than the sprightly 20 year old to finish crossing, yet under normal circumstances the average wait time gets reduced. Even with the amber light the crossing red time to traffic was still set to allow sufficient time for most people to get across with traffic stopped.

[dazzer89]

Originally Posted by Cobbydaler

I always used to think that at junctions with pedestrian lights they were only activated when someone pushed the button. i.e. if nobody was waiting to cross the road then the lights wouldn't change to red to let (the non-existent) person cross.

Driving through central Manchester every morning to work I see that this isn't the case. Even if nobody is waiting to cross, all the lights at a four way junction turn red & the pedestrian lights turn green. This holds up traffic for no reason & increases journey times and pollution unnecessarily. This is known as a 'full pedestrian stage'.

This has been picked up on by the RAC Foundation...

Link

Drives me mad!

It's got to the stage now where the pedestrians control the traffic.

There's a road near us where the local Council installed a new pedestrian crossing 3 years ago, it's a nightmare right from the word go in a morning right up until the traffic dies down about 6:30pm, the pedestrians are forever pressing the button stopping the traffic, it lets 2 cars through at the most. At rush hour the traffic can tail back well over ½ a mile due to the crossing.

There was nothing wrong with the old one so why fix something that isn't broken?? When it was cold in December they were stuck on green, there wasn't any hold ups then.