Has anyone heard of this whole nonsense that the government has been making streetlights yellow for less time?

Question

read this article:http://www.leftlanenews.com/six-us-cities-tamper-with-traffic-cameras-for-profit.html

Apparently 6 U.S. cities have been caught making the time that street lights are yellow allot shorter, ignoring the safety benefit of the legal duration for the lights being yellow. They were doing it just to catch more people running red lights. Is it just me or should our government not be trying to make us criminals?

Answer 1

I find that difficult, if not impossible, to believe.

First of all, this is not a credible news source, it is a private website. Secondly, they suggest increasing the yellow to promote safety. Increasing the time of a yellow light  will do just the opposite, as more people will believe they have time to get through before it turns red.

Contrary to what most motorists believe, a solid yellow light is not the same as a flashing. Flashing means slow down and prepare to stop. A solid yellow means stop, unless you are so close to stop safely.

Additional: You can not believe everything you read. That is a blog, not a news source. Even the link they reference is a private site, and not a news source. If those allegations were true, they would be all over the major networks. Do your really think CNN would pass on a story of a local government defrauding one million dollars from citizens?

Answer 2

The experts quoted have an anti traffic control, of any sort, agenda. No one was found guilty, there were some problems at a few intersections in those towns with photo timing, not shortening the yellows.

Traffic light photo enforcement has been around along time.  The industry is policed to make sure there are as few such problems as possible. The laws that area passed in most municipalities follow a basic set of laws that prohibit the shortening of yellows. In fact one of the suggestions to traffic engineers is that yellows be slightly lengthened for safety.

Answer 3

"The duration of a yellow change interval shall be predetermined.

Guidance:

A yellow change interval should have a duration of approximately 3 to 6 seconds. The longer intervals should be reserved for use on approaches with higher speeds.

Option:

The yellow change interval may be followed by a red clearance interval to provide additional time before conflicting traffic movements, including pedestrians, are released."

I learned about this during a crash reconstruction class where we had a guess speaker who specialized in traffic lights.  Longer yellow lights for faster traffic flow and shorter yellow lights for slower traffic flow.

If a government is shortening the yellow light, then it's going against the federal standard (the below mentioned reference) and is setting themselves up for major legal trouble.

Answer 4

I heard this, thought it was just rumor....but there it is in black & white.....those SOB's!!!!!!

Answer 5

Yep there's quite a few articles about it, newspaper and TV sites...

But you know how "unreliable" modern hardware is, those things just happen......

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=...

Just another cash cow a few idiots tried to milk,

Where I live the yellow lights are fairly long, and when it turns red, the crosstreet has about a two second delay before it goes green

That's for safety to clear the intersection, they care abit more about that here