Safe Speed Forums

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/mai ... ghts14.xml

By Martin Cassini, author of the You Tube video on the same subject posted hereabouts, and with whom I have just spent a very pleasant evening.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I'm not sure which junctions he is observing but what I usually see is no congestion in one direction with the crossing traffic snarled up for miles.

Some lights are superfluous but a lot of junctions will need a major redesign to make them work.

This for instance.

The junctiun above is a waste of money!
I am sure that a roundabout works better as long as the traffic is equal in direction for each road entering/leaving the roundabout. as a car takes exit A a car ffrom entrance A can join the roundabout.

In-ballance could be altered by two traffic kight poles 50m back from the roundabout metering the amout of traffic allowed to proceed to the giveway line. So at peak times if the trunk road was swamping the minor road a road sensor could activate the flow control.


I actually agree Traffic lights are over used and over phased. They cost a lot to put in and maintain.
Just look at how many people cross this junction OMG

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Speed limit sign radio interview. TV Snap Unhappy
“It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be - that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution” He added that there should be a prosecution: “wherever it appears that the offence or the circumstances of its commission is or are of such a character that a prosecution in respect thereof is required in the public interest”
This approach has been endorsed by Attorney General ever since 1951. CPS Code

The junction with all those traffic lights is on Westferry Road, Docklands, E14 and the lights are just for decoration.

There is a mini-roundabout at that junction (the junction with Marsh Wall). (It is not Westferry Circus which is slightly further North and up a ramp, and is a roundabout junction with some pedestrian lights on it).

I have just come through the roadworks at the M1junction 21 entry slip. For a few weeks the lights have been taken down. Traffic flows onto the roundabout. No probs. The only conjestion is because they have filtered the traffic from 4 lanes to 2 in the wrong place. Now they have switched the traffic lights back on.......Gridlock!

Nice one........

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Speed camera policy Kills

Milton Keynes is famous for its roundabouts and free-flowing traffic, so what have they decided to do, introduce a set of traffic lights. Needless to say it has caused chaos and gridlock, so they had to turn them off and revert to a temporary roundabout again.

In another case at Bar Hill, near Cambridge, everything was fine at the roundabout;
http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2& ... ne=4256882
until they decided to install traffic lights, which just caused complete chaos. Within a week they were shut down and a few weeks later were removed.

Why is it these road engineers seem to think they know best and have to break what is working perfectly ok.

The one in Paul's areticle or the one I linked to?

Th eone in Paul's article is art, not a real junction.



If you mean the one I linked to it's a major interchange, there is no way a simple roundabout could replace the mess which currently exists.

That's not to say it couldn't be improved, there is plenty of space for grade separation.

Does anyone remember where the You Tube thread on the same subject is? I've tried searching and failed to find it.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Not the one you were looking for, but relevant... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdKMjPU9ITM

This is the one you want:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nHx3SRpRXU

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Is the first of these two (with the turbulnce and hooting) Cairo? It certainly reminds me of the Cairo practice...

No I think it's India.

Go to YouTube.com, enter TRAFFIC LIGHTS in the search pane, and take your pick - there are some really good clips including a series of appalling lights in towns, CAUSING mayhem, instead of solving it!

Anybody been to Gurnsey and tried their junctions? I thought their attitude was brilliant - but it would take a major thought change in MOTORISTS for it to work here. Basically, they just allow each other out in rotation at busy junctions.
When I got to a junction with a main road, somebody let me out within seconds - every time!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Traffic does flow better generally without traffic lights, peak time or not. The fastest part of y bus journey at rush hour along a strategic road is along the bit without traffic lights; otherwise it is stop start due to the inefficiency of the traffic lights trying to replace the human brain.

Hi, this is Martin Cassini, who wrote the Telegraph piece and made In Your Car No-one Can Hear You Scream! (on YouTube.com).

Thank you for your postings - much appreciated, and thank you, Paul, for your campaigning zeal and for starting this forum. Most of you echo my thoughts. I know the Bar Hill roundabout, which is a fine (!) example of profligate over-regulation. The Guernsey system sounds like filter-in-turn, which I advocate, and which would work anywhere.

My project is pro-environment but not anti-motorist. It identifies traffic policy as the unreported cause of congestion, and offers simple, inexpensive, coherent solutions. Although widely accepted as essential, traffic lights are an unnecessary evil. The Transport Research Laboratory itself says they can make matters worse. The safety claims made for lights were fatally exposed by the death of the 28 year-old cyclist in Fulham the other day, crushed by a lorry as she waited at lights.

The root of the problem is the main road priority rule, introduced in 1929. In the teeth of common law principles of fair play, which allow people to take their turn at junctions more or less in the sequence in which they arrive, main road priority confers inferior rights on side road traffic and pedestrians. Lights were introduced to interrupt the new main road streams and enable other road-users to enter or cross. They are a manufactured solution to a self-inflicted problem. It's not just that lights make matters worse (e.g. by forcing us to fume at red when no-one is using the green), they foul things up in the first place. When we're left to our own devices – as seen at junctions where the lights are out of action – courtesy flourishes, and we filter in turn without incident or delay. Priority rules and lights frustrate the human instinct to co-operate, and force us to behave in ways that are alien to our nature. There is something inhumane about a system that instils greater respect for a traffic light than for human life.

Martin

I live in a fairly new estate and all of the roads exiting the estate are not controlled by traffic lights.

Even in peak hour there are rarely more than 3 cars waiting to enter the main road as the cars on the main road often back off to allow cars to enter and there are regular gaps anyway. Simple courtesy seems to work well.

On the weekend I went to the local shopping centre and had to turn right at a major "controlled" intersection. The right turn lanes were controlled by a seperate arrow and it only allowed 3-4 rows of cars through at a time. I waited through 3 sets of lights before I got through, all the while watching the cross road virtually devoid of traffic for 80-90% of the time.

When it finally came to my turn there was only one car ahead of me. The lights changed and he spent a good 5 seconds sitting there before finally moving off VERY slowly. And he wondered why I abused him for his selfish attitude.

No lights = alert and quick actions. Lights = brain out of gear, oh the lights have changed, maybe I had better select a gear......

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Ross

Yes I'm a hoon, but only on the track!!!!

Don't blame the guy who was slow off the mark. Blame the system.

More anon.

Hi Martin

Somebody else normally gets in quick with this, but...

Traffic lights are in most urban areas an absolute curse, and I really don't like them. It was really drummed into me when a local set of lights for a T junction broke down for a week. Normal traffic levels are some queuing from all directions - about 500 yards from the direction of my house with less from the others. So it broke down, and the queues vanished completely for all directions, and all types of road users (no pedestrian queues either). Then they fixed them, and we are back to 500 yard queues outside of my house every day.

There are some cases where they do improve things, such as J4 of the M5 N, where before lights were installed the queues to get off the motorway were on most nights 200yards plus down L1 of the motorway, and after they were installed this only occasionally happens. On the other hand. a re-design of the system by including a filter to go left directly from the slip road would probably have been much more effective.

All good stuff. My hunch, which I hope to test one of these days, possibly during the course of a TV series, is that if we were free to filter in turn, we wouldn't need lights at all. Volume of traffic can be a drama, but it beomes a crisis when controls are added.

PS The rule book tells us to enter a junction before the junction is clear of traffic that's already there. Would you try to enter a phone box before the person inside had left? That's how fatuous the rule book is. If the only priority rule was the common law one of first-come, first-served, like the single queueing system, and if we took our turn at junctions more or less in the sequence in which we arrived - only entering it when our exit was clear - most of our congestion problems would dissolve. Then, if we had to wait sometimes, we would know we weren't waiting for perverse lights, but because a lot of people were out in their cars, which is bearable. When you know the reason for a hold-up, you don't get stressed. The unreported root cause of congestion and road rage is regulation itself.

Yes, the NY method - place your hand over the horn when stopped at lights and press down if the driver doesn't react within 1/4sec of the lights changing

The answer to the wasted green light at traffic light controlled junctions could come in the form of fuzzy logic. This uses the IF THEN statement, IF no traffic approaching the junction from the left or right THEN hold lights at green. This system will know whether it is winter or summer, light or dark, wet, dry or icy. Expected volume of traffic at any given time. Using this information the central processor of the system will alter the cycle time, using road pressure sensors it will also calculate the amount of cars behind the red light and cars behind the green light. It will then calculate the most efficient and safe way to keep the traffic flowing.

The technology is used in many cities around the world.