{"id":3034,"date":"2025-01-09T08:11:02","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T08:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/?p=3034"},"modified":"2025-01-09T08:11:04","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T08:11:04","slug":"understanding-the-traffic-light-controversy-in-chicago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/book-reviews-summary\/understanding-the-traffic-light-controversy-in-chicago\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding the Traffic Light Controversy in Chicago"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Number of words: 619<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Halloween 2013, I was driving home after an early release from my job at the time. At a major intersection here in Chicago, I was driving below the speed limit (Chicago traffic!) through a yellow light just as an oncoming driver decided to turn left without the right of way. She crashed into me and totaled my car; I was fine besides an airbag burn on my arm, but my car was past the sell-by date for repairs being worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Afterward, a police officer said to us both, \u201cA yellow light is not a race.\u201d The other driver was a busy mom with her toddler in a car seat, and her car was mostly unharmed. We shared Halloween candy from a plastic pumpkin in her trunk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A yellow light may not be a race, but it\u2019s definitely a big problem. And Sweden-born engineer Mats J\u00e4rlstr\u00f6m is a crusader trying to fight for the solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When J\u00e4rlstr\u00f6m\u2019s wife got a red-light ticket in 2013, he examined the footage and fought the ticket in court based on his observation that the yellow light wasn\u2019t long enough. His city of Beaverton, Oregon had a law on the books requiring a 3.5-second yellow light. Before Beaverton, cities like Dallas, Chattanooga, and Nashville had already been caught<\/a> shortening yellow lights by 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, Chicago faced and lost a giant lawsuit for its combination of record-short yellow lights and wild number of red-light cameras<\/a> that brought in $285 million<\/a> between 2011 and 2015. Chicago chose to scrape the very bottom of the federally regulated range for yellow lights in a city with the third worst traffic<\/a> in the nation. In a city where the minimum wage, $13 an hour, is nearly 80 percent higher than the federal minimum wage, to choose the federal minimum for anything<\/em> is intentional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, the IEEE magazine Spectrum<\/em> reports<\/a> the latest good news for J\u00e4rlstr\u00f6m: The Institute of Transportation Engineers<\/a> (ITE), which has a chapter in every state, has agreed with his report that the existing yellow-light calculus is not adequate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This has been a long process for J\u00e4rlstr\u00f6m, who was a credentialed electrical engineer in Sweden before moving to the U.S. in the early \u201890s. When he began doing research and writing inquiries about yellow lights, Oregon\u2019s governing body of licensed engineers fined him for claiming to be an engineer<\/a>. He sued them, and won, for violating his freedom of speech. (Finally, an application that really involves the legal definition<\/a> of free speech.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J\u00e4rlstr\u00f6m basically appointed himself as the Erin Brockovich of yellow-light law, chasing leads and asking for help from experts until he finally got their attention. Making inroads with the ITE is a great start. In a 2014 article, Gizmodo<\/em><\/a> shared a 2012 Transportation Research Board survey that showed 40 percent of cities used ITE-designed metrics and equations to calculate their yellow-light length. ITE\u2019s own 2017 survey showed similar numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In consulting with ITE members and even speaking at one of their conferences, J\u00e4rlstr\u00f6m is pushing for one specific change to the kinematic equation. The shorter yellow lights to increase ticketing are a safety problem in general<\/a>, but in J\u00e4rlstr\u00f6m\u2019s wife\u2019s case, her issue was that she was waiting to turn<\/em> during a yellow light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of the different speed and approach to making a left turn, the equation didn\u2019t assign enough of a time value to account for this slower part of intersection traffic. J\u00e4rlstr\u00f6m\u2019s work doesn\u2019t seek to replace the ITE\u2019s existing equation at all, but instead, add mathematical nuance that will include people waiting to turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI want it to be a collaboration. The common goal is to improve traffic safety and fairness in intersections,\u201d J\u00e4rlstr\u00f6m told Spectrum<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excerpted from<\/em> https:\/\/www.popularmechanics.com\/technology\/infrastructure\/a29815025\/yellow-lights-too-short\/<\/em><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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