[kstrauser]

My hometown got busted making yellow lights shorter than the legally required duration, then hitting drivers with tickets for running a red light they couldn't have safely and reasonably avoided.

There are standards for this kind of thing, like if a light is on a road with a speed limit of X, then a yellow light has to last Y seconds. Imagine a yellow light that lasted .5s: you'd have to stand on your brakes and risk causing a rear end collision from the car behind you to even have a chance of not getting fined. That's the opposite of safety. My place wasn't that bad, but a defendant successfully demonstrated that the yellow light he was tricked by was illegally short, and a judge basically threw out all the tickets from it and others.

I mention this as just one example of specific light setups that suck. I bet you're right, and this is just a money grab from the local gov't.

Read this if you want to be angry today: https://ww2.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-sho...

[hnburnsy]

In same states they also mark the intersection start where the curb ends and not at the crosswalk starts, so you think since you passed the crosswalk under yellow you are safe to proceed but you have not yet entered the intersection.

[morkalork]

Is this the case where instead of admitting to it, the municipality attempted to have the complainant prosecuted for practicing engineering without a licence?

[kstrauser]

No, that was Oregon's turn to be Embarrassment of the Week: https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...

[sixothree]

In my city they synchronized the light so that each one turns red just as the pack of cars is reaching it. To be clear the obvious implication I'm making is that they did this to increase the chance someone would run the light and increase revenue.

This does mean that if you're in the front of the pack and go about 15 over the speed limit, you won't "catch" the red light.

When you're not in the front of the pack it can be frustrating trying to travel just 3 or 4 miles with the red lights not even a full half mile from each other. Even late at night if you follow the speed limit, you are penalized. You will sit at every red light and look at the vast stretch of nothingness that has the right of way.

If they didn't do this to generate red light revenue, they could have done this to generate more revenue from the gas tax they collect by making people start & stop more often, and from sitting in traffic longer. But I suppose both things could be true. And no, I won't accept any other plausible explanations (/s, but holy heck is government awful here).

[sejje]

I haven't run into those (I mostly drive in rural areas--in fact, there's no stoplight in my county) -- but I do run into some lights that just change in the middle of the night, for no reason, and then take a really long time to change back to green, despite not even a single car being present / going through.

[NetMageSCW]

Lights with sensors have a backup pattern of timed changes so that you won’t get stuck at a light where the sensor isn’t seeing your car.

[sejje]

Okay, well it should be about a 10 second green light, but it's more like 2 minutes.

This is a side street that in high traffic times might see 4 or 5 cars waiting.