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Think of a dessert town with only one stoplight. Everything barrels by at high speed, almost no one stops in town. The locals will always have to wait a long time to cross.
Suppose you know at the top of every hour the light will turn green and you can just drive across the busy highway. You might
need to buy a good watch, but it would be very convenient. Even the truckers would know "you don't want to hit Eli-Huntsville at exactly the top of the hour" and go faster or slower in order to miss the stop.
If sensors in the asphalt say no one waiting to cross, the light would not need to activate.
No doubt some stop lights do something like this, So maybe just a road sign to announce the timing scheme is all that is needed.
( A sequence of dozen lights along a dozen blocks wouldn't work well. But you synchronize once every morning, and hope for the best.)
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Annotation:
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Most modern systems are demand-managed. They stay on green for the primary route, as long as nothing shows up at the side roads - but when a vehicle is detected approaching, the changeover sequence starts. |
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There's a timer so that if there's been no side-road traffic for a while, anything arriving gets priority. |
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What really needs attention is greater use of the "Turn on Red if safe to do so" law. |
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// Think of a dessert town with only one stoplight.
Everything barrels by at high speed, almost no one stops in
town. // |
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Is this a country of health nuts? |
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