Some more electronics may stop us all seeing red about traffic lights

What is it with traffic lights? They often make me see red and seem to be stuck on that colour. They just don’t seem to have kept up with today’s traffic flow and demands on road space.

To my mind they are insensitive to the job they have to do and seem to be set in a time warp of time switches. Insensitive? By this I mean they do not react quickly enough to changing traffic conditions and I am convinced this behaviour contributes to jams and back-ups.

Their erratic behaviour makes many of us see red so there has to be a better way of living with them. While they may control vehicles quite well for much of the time, electronics could bring them into the 21st century and ease some of our frustrations.

Having gone beyond pneumatic rubber pads set into the road to induction loops buried beneath the road, I am suspicious of the many time-switches that appear to control traffic flow rather than the traffic itself.

How many times, late at night, have you approached a light showing green only to have it change to red for NO REASON WHATSOVER when you are just too far away to go through the intersection while ghostly invisible traffic moves through the crossing.

Take another example of pent-up frustration. You’re waiting to turn right at a controlled crossing. There is a long, long gap in the traffic coming towards you but do the lights change to let you cross? No. A time switch says it is not yet your turn so sit there you must. And when the lights finally change in your favour, only half the queued vehicles get through before the red comes on again, so long was the wait.

While we’re on the subject of waiting, whatever happened to the pelican crossing? There are still a few survivors of the amber flashing lights set allowing drivers to move across them if no one is in the road. Forget expensive conversions, why can’t all pedestrian crossings allow drivers to cross so long as no one is on the crossing? What a difference to traffic smoothing this would make in evening out the flow.

While we’re on about traffic flow, what about those selfish drivers who clog up the left lane on a filter light. Why is it not compulsory to follow the line of the arrow? If you are in the wrong lane, too bad!

Yes, I know there are command centres where traffic is watched and supposedly collected from roadside cameras and controlled from information displayed on television screens. But it is impossible to watch every junction and every light in a city the size of Sydney. And this is where on-site electronics could be so useful in assessing and acting on local conditions. While lights may cope with an average traffic flow, they need finetuning to avoid those stupid delays outside the average.

Traffic lights have a long history. We can blame the English for introducing them in 1867 when they looked like escaped railway semaphore signals. In those days the road signals were lit by gas until one of them blew up, killing the operator and the use of gas. So it came down to the Americans to produce the modern, electrically powered signal which was then adopted and adapted worldwide.

Widely used as they are, I do not believe they truly work as well as they could in today’s road conditions. They need to be more sensitive and respond faster to traffic flows. More sets of lights on main roads should be linked to provide a continuous flow of vehicles, even if they travel slowly.

And this is where the electronics should be working for us drivers. With today’s microprocessors, surely it is possible to prevent hold-ups on turns and stop-start progress along main roads. And it would be a much cheaper option than building new motorways that only tend to move the traffic snarls a little further down the road.

We talk a lot about the need for ever more and wider roads, and endless freeways. A far cheaper option that would go a long way to alleviating many of our suburban traffic problems would be to overhaul the workings of our traffic lights.

However, let’s not expect to see the green light very soon - environmental colour or not.