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by jakecopp 1075 days ago
Why do pedestrians in Sydney wait so long at traffic lights? I tried to find out the answer to this simple question and wrote a blog post of my findings - keen to hear your thoughts!

I cover and share previously unpublished maps of signal timings, ODbL crowdsourced data from a open source website I built, how it costs $200 to buy data on a single intersection from the state government, details on signal programming in a proprietary plain text format, comparisons with best practice in Copenhagen and elsewhere, and what's in store for the future of traffic signals in Australia.

Sydney is an important study location as it is the birthplace and development location of the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System (abbreviated SCATS).

Our government sells the system commercially to 30 countries and 200 cities around the world. We are quite literally exporting our biases. Countries that use Australia's traffic light system include New Zealand, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Amman, Tehran, Dublin, Rzeszów, Gdynia, Central New Jersey, and in part of Metro Atlanta. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Coordinated_Adaptive_Tr...
2 comments
throwaheyy 1073 days ago
The city of Bellevue WA adopted SCATS a few years ago and driving there seems much more pleasant now. I can drive from downtown Bellevue to the Microsoft campus and often face only two red lights (if you know the area: crossing 20th St/Northrop Way and then turning left onto 156th Ave). Before you would be stuck at a bunch of red lights after the cross traffic was long gone. And almost every intersection now has permissive left turns where before you’d have to wait on an unnecessarily long red arrow. Don’t know how “dumb” their system was before but it’s been a big improvement.
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interestica 1073 days ago
What's the pedestrian experience like now compared to before?
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throwaheyy 1073 days ago
No idea. Bellevue is pretty suburban. Most people drive, it’s too spread out to walk many places.
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WarOnPrivacy 1075 days ago
> Why do pedestrians in Sydney wait so long at traffic lights?

They don't immediately cross when they get a walk signal?

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jakecopp 1075 days ago
They do - however it may be multiple minutes before they get a green walk signal unfortunately.
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