Noise and air pollution would go down. Time waiting in traffic would go down. Crashes would go down.
Of all the things that have been optimized in the worod today by algorithmic analysis of data, it just surprises me that this hasn't been one of them.
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THAT'S WHY YOU PATENT YOUR TECHNOLOGY!
…which in practice tend to be more expensive to implement and maintain. Systems like this one can work because they take advantage of highly available commodity infrastructure.
There are some traffic patterns where roundabouts don't do well. I've seen the following. Imagine a four way roundabout with north, east, south and west. Predominate rush hour traffic is towards the east. Heavy traffic entering from north. More entering from west. Most exiting at east with very little going around beyond west. Entering from south can be nearly impossible since they're waiting for a break from both north and west.
In Germany, there's an established but much more low tech approach to this problem: simply turn off the traffic lights at night! All traffic lights already have yield/stop/priority signs as a fallback, so those take over. The yellow lights on the side street will usually flash as an additional warning so you don't overlook the yield/stop sign.
It's also probably cheaper than the extra physical infrastructure needed for inductive loops, given that all the necessary equipment (phones, GPS, cell infrastructure) is already in place for most people.
Historically, traffic control systems detected cars with sensors embedded in the road. The cars had to come to the light to be detected.
It's the most reliable method, but it requires the car to nearly come to a stop first to get to the right spot.
It's easy to imagine more complicated computer vision or radar systems detecting cars. These are orders of magnitude more complex, though. When cities install traffic infrastructure they want to leave it alone and service it as infrequently as possible. It also needs to last for decades before replacement. Modern systems that are cheap, robust, and can detect traffic from a distance throughout different conditions like rain, snow, dark, and fog reliably are a recent invention. It's going to be decades before these are widely retrofitted to long-standing infrastructure.
Of course, the other thing they do in the UK is use small roundabouts, that can handle a fair amount of traffic nice and smoothly.
Data.
After 10:30pm through 6am, the main road's lights go blinking yellow, and the side road's lights to blinking red.
Its basically easy to get around, since most lights are now a yield or stop. No app goofiness or any of that. And it has been implementable for decades.
Many American cities do this, too.
Well, they don't turn the lights off. They flash to distinguish this state from the power being off.
It's more common in smaller cities.
It totally makes sense as an approach. No point in having normal traffic light cycles on low-traffic streets at 2 AM.
That's often overlooked with ideas like this.
They are the products of https://ndrive.com/ , https://www.flitsmeister.nl and https://be-mobile.com/ .
They also focus on toll collecting and parking fees, so "pay to play" is in a sense already in their DNA. Why do these commercial entities get to influence public traffic lights? And due to the inherent red-queen arms race in this, not installing any of these apps will explicitly disadvantage you as the 'smart' traffic lights (already 1 in 8 and growing rapidly) do favor the app users.
Having drivers reach for their phone when they're approaching traffic lights - common pedestrian crossing points - is categorically moronic.
No app required.
I don't think something like ETSI ITS can be implemented in apps like this, although ITS does seem to have a TCP/UDP transport so maybe I'm wrong.
Packaging this in app form seems like an excellent way to permit someone to emulate a couple dozen installs, all traveling along the same path, tricking congestion systems into giving them priority over other traffic participants.
The location of the lights doesn't exactly point to usage by cyclists.
As far as I know, almost all traffic lights in the Netherlands work with magnetic sensors under the road for presence detection. Then there are a few optical cameras for congestion detection at specific intersections.
The magnetic sensors don't pick up ultralight or carbon road bikes, but bikes usually have an additional push button anyway.
It depends on the city, but unless you're on the highway or about to enter one, a traffic light here can be assumed to serve bikes.
I found that link a few years ago thanks to an app I used when I went to university: https://www.enschedefietsstad.nl/enschede-fietst-app/snel-gr... The municipality has an app that will integrate with the iVRI system to have traffic lights turn green faster for bikes. It doesn't do anything for cars, it's built purely to try to convince more people not to travel by car.
Of course, iVRI data providing information about incoming bicycles don't automatically reprogram traffic lights to give them priority. However, the information is available. I've had the Enschede app trigger a "this app requested X green lights during your ride" popup in other cities; I'm pretty sure it's just an iVRI integration, not one restricted by a specific municipality.
This just allows for better traffic flow management by predicting influxes of traffic along long roads.
But, more importantly, it allows traffic planners to analyze popular sources/destinations on the road map. If 90% of cars turn left at a certain traffic light but only because the traffic light before it takes forever to turn green, they can tweak the scheduling to divide traffic more evenly.
The obvious downside, of course, is that this data will quickly show individuals when analyzing patterns in remote areas.
As you said, it's 100% the wrong approach.
Except that's not what they want here. What they want is for the apps that most people already use to add support for this.
The only way to do this effectively is with a planned route, and hence why they need to use an app (the one you're using to navigate/route plan with) and why having the main navigation apps people tend to use (e.g. Waze, GMaps) is desirable.
There used to be a traffic light in Ithaca where if you were heading out of town via the South hill you could bypass South Aurora St and instead go up a residential street up a steep hill with very little traffic, hang a left and trigger the light and almost always get the light to turn red in front of the person who was in front of you on the main road.
They retimed it so this didn't work anymore.
So, we took his motorcycle.
We come up to a street light, and it's not sensing us. So, I hop off, run over, press the WALK button, and run back and hop back on. In moments, the light turns green, the WALK sign says WALK and we're on our way.
Inevitably, a couple of blocks later, we're in the same boat.
Being too clever by half, I rinse and repeat -- off the bike, hit the WALK button, run back.
This time, the WALK sign turned on, but the light remained red.
Curses.
We just ran that one.
You mean the button for pedestrians to pass the crosswalk I guess? Why would it say "WALK" (be green for pedestrians?) and also be green for a vehicle to pass? The crosswalks around me are the reverse, if pedestrians can pass, no vehicles can pass, and vice-versa. Or maybe I misunderstood something?
Manual control is also possible. The wait time is displayed on the dash along with the fee. If the fee is below the configured maximum you can press a green button, if there are no higher auto-bids the light will turn green. If there are the fee increases for you to press the button again.
It would finally provide a fun game for people with high testosterone issues so that they can assert their dominance by handing out free money. That you own a fancy car doesn't mean you get to go first, I have more money than you therefore you should wait while watching me cross the crossing. The old lady behind the Bentley also gets 500 euro in her account.
Bit annoying, when you are in a cross street, and you know it's about to turn green, then an ambulance comes by, and it skips your turn.
I think there's also a black market for the devices for impatient drivers.
My local (EU) ER/ A+E hospital flashes up messages like "child emergency...all doctors called", "car accident, patient due in", "stroke victim, just admitted", and everyone just goes "ahhhh, fuck", and waits longer.
I'd love to know the significant time lost, as a percentage of your life, with regards to the amount of time an ambulance could possibly delay you.
Whenever I hear sirens, I always think "Someone is having a worse day than I am."
Around here, we are pretty solicitous of emergency vehicles. We pull over, or don't enter an intersection, if we hear sirens. Every now and then, some inflamed hemorrhoid cuts off the fire truck, but it's rare.
I live in Berlin, which doesn't have such sensors and it's always frustrating waiting for lights to change when there's no traffic.
I can also tell you that even in a country with sensors all over the place, I do sometimes end up waiting on an intersection with no traffic. I assume it's some kind of public transportation/emergency vehicle priority system activating, or maybe it's an attempt to calm traffic downstream where loads of traffic has piled up already so intersections don't get blocked.
Either way, adding sensors doesn't necessarily make traffic lights immune to unnecessary waiting times.
https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traff...
When I lived in Brussels all traffic lights of intersections would go green at the same time and red at the same time. So lights for pedestrians AND cars in ALL directions. People just can't drive at all, they can only honk their horn. Potholes in the highway are filled with pebbles and sand, etc
My theory is that it has to do with how they learn to drive: It used to be super easy to get a drivers license in Belgium back in the day. Basically you'd just go to the town hall and buy one. They now have a system where you get a special permit to driver with an 'experienced' supervisor. Usually one of your parents for a certain number of months before going to an exam to get your license.
Let's say that a professional driving instructor can get across 80-90% of their knowledge of driving cars to someone. Now imagine how poorly an amateur would do, 50%? 30%? So you learn 30% of someone who learned 30% of someone...
In general though, it just shows how unimportant the average Belgian finds cars or properly learning about driving them and traffic, etc. So maybe the learning how to drive is just a symptom of an overal lack of caring with regards to driving properly. As this strange pay-to-win driving schema also shows.
While there are a few of commercial apps that can integrate now, The goal is to have every navigation/gps app have the ability to do this. This can also be done by privacy friendly apps.
> Why do these commercial entities get to influence public traffic lights?
The commercial entities don't influence anything, they provide a tool for their users to influence the lights.
> And due to the inherent red-queen arms race
What arms race is inherent here? Traffic isn't (or shouldn't be) a competition but a cooperation.
Your whole comment seems weird because the main point of the article us that most people seem unwilling to change navigation apps to take advantage of this feature so widespread adoption will wait till the apps people are already using (and which already get all that data) support the standard.
But it is not.
"The commercial entities don't influence anything, they provide a tool for their users to influence the lights."
While milking their data with gov backed incentives. Pay us with your data, and we will provide you tweaking traffic lights. What exactly are you running defense for?
"Traffic isn't (or shouldn't be) a competition but a cooperation"
Have you driven in Belgium? It is what it is, not what it "should" be.
If it were a single, government-made app then there would be no such choice.
This is a system to detect "in 32 minutes, twenty-five cars will come from the south, crossing sixteen cars from the east. By pausing the western traffic lights for three seconds, both streams of cars can drive past each other without clogging up the main intersection".
Users don't need to press buttons on apps, they're just using their existing navigation apps which are already providing them with directions (or in the case of Flitsmeister, speed cameras). Similar apps also exist for pedestrians and bikes in my country. My biking experience certainly has improved by having lights on empty/near empty intersections automatically turn green when I'm approaching.
I'd rather see more roundabouts rather than the badly scheduled traffic light system my city has, but the system works for me.
There's the ever-present privacy threat of sharing your (aggregate) location, of course, but in this case we're talking about the government, which pretty much has a live map of what phones are moving where already.
I agree that the app-based system would theoretically be slightly better in that it has more information to work with, but given that we're basically talking about a stochastic process then it feels like the IR system should really be good enough.
Seems like possibly it's a small enough region that you could cram it into a MILP solver?
It's not the first time apps are being shoved where they shouldn't belong by the Flemish Government. They made a cooking app of half a million Euro [1] and there were trials where you could use an app to to get the deposit back on plastic bottles by scanning the bottle and your wastebag [2].
I'm not sure if it's incompetence, trying to look modern or just plain old corruption.
[1] https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2025/05/27/kookapp-van-vlaamse-...
[2] https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2023/05/23/cordacampus-proefpro...
I don't know the technical details on how it's done here in Stockholm, even less in the suburbs where I've lived but it feels like magic that in some traffic lights in busier intersections they'll just trigger by themselves with enough distance that when I arrive with the bike at the intersection the lights are turning green for me.
I have looked for cameras but couldn't find them, it's even more puzzling in a specific intersection close to my house where I bike along a 4-lane road with only fields of wheat and grass, and the intersection I cross leads to an industrial area, there are only the posts for the pedestrian/bike lights and those still turn green, no cameras in sight, no detection trap on the pavement.
Do cyclists need automatic detection? Yes, absolutely. If you think otherwise, would you want to park and exit your car every time you want to cross an intersection? It's no different for a cyclist.
The article says that the they just ned a relevant app running on their phone when they're approaching an relevant traffic light, and there's no mention that users need to actively do anything.
Also please have a read through the HN guidelines regarding your punchline "is categorically moronic."
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It's even worse when they overtake me and stop in front of me at an intersection with two lanes where they could just stay in the fucking lane they used to overtake me.
I swear some driver are doing it on purpose because they hate everyone else on the road.
It happens when they are yielding to someone behind that's going faster than them. It's quite common here in Europe.
And plenty of turning lanes in New Zealand will not trigger the green turning arrow unless a car is waiting. If you don't get onto the sensor before the phase completes for the cross traffic, then you need to wait a full phase of lights before the green arrow is enabled (which can be quite a while, depending on pedestrians and other turning lanes etc).
It depends on time of day and wether cars coming the other direction are waiting to turn.
A few intersections are very cycle unfriendly, because they separate induction sensors for cycles are not installed for all lanes.
Not saying that your explanation is wrong, just saying that in some circumstances, hooning up to the light can reduce wait times for drivers.
The same thing can happen when walking (pressing the pedestrian cross button in time can reduce the waiting time before you can cross), or cycling (sometimes you need to get onto the cycle induction sensor to get the green cycle lights faster).
???
Seems like the far more plausible reason is that drivers don't want to be held up by a cyclist traveling at 10mph in front of them? Moreover if it's really true that lights only turn from red once a car reached them, then it makes sense to maintain speed (including overtaking any bicycles), because getting to the light faster means it turns to green sooner.
1. induction coil sensor dug in road at the traffic light
2. radar sensor at 100-200m from the traffic light
It feels like magic because if you hit sensor (2) and there are no other competing cars, the traffic light changes for you and you don't have to slow down.
This is the best solution. In Dublin, they only have sensor (1) and it feels really slow in comparison. You keep having to stop and start.
Also I should say that this is empirical evidence based on about 20 intersections I pass often. I don't know how much of a rule it is country wise as I don't pay attention to that when I go places I don't routinely go.
Again, the whole thrust of this article is that people aren't incentivized yet to use or switch navigation apps.
> But it is not.
Yet. If that is something you want, go fund some opensource mapping apps to add the feature.
Without detailed technical information, this seems like a reasonable approach to solve a hard problem that isn't well solved now. Opt-in traffic data collection via an open standard api seems like be best case scenario here.
I'd be interested in specific criticism about how mapping apps are given access to the API, what exact data has to be shared to enable or other specific aspects of this program.
Your knee-jerk reactionary talking points aren't interesting though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060317013200/http://www.i-hack...
Of course this article came with many disclaimers that to actually do this would be very illegal.
I was more than a little sad when I typed i-hacked.com into the browser and got redirected to some etsy page. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine, I guess.
That being said, this is kind of a non-issue already, I have heard a story about someone abusing the preempt sensors like 10 years ago and never since then. Maybe there already exists an encoding scheme.
IMO a huge majority of people realize how illegal it would be to mess with these things, and the risk/reward is very low. Anyone who would take that risk would probably just run a red light instead.
These days, many dishwashers, refrigerators, coffee machines etc. routinely connect to the internet. The tech is well established, and projects like this become possible precisely because they’re not that complicated to build or maintain. They take advantage of common infrastructure, and can often be cheaper than supposedly “simpler” alternatives.
And as a side effect, we get very funny cyber-security news weekly!
The connectivity at the traffic lights can be a small box, easily replaced, much more cheaply than e.g. traffic sensors under the road.
If the system fails for some reason, such as an internet outage, traffic lights can fall back to ordinary timing.
You’re not raising serious objections.
The smart traffic light management systems are already in place in many intersections already, this is just hooking another source of traffic information into the system without having to dig open concrete or asphalt.
That is probably more useful for planning an attack on emergency vehicles.
Although why even bother with servers? Just call in a fake emergency (or cause a real emergency) at a place of your choosing, and the government will send emergency vehicles to you.
Assuming the procurement/contracting for said app is done competently, which seems questionable for most governments. Moreover even if it's cheaper, surely some sort of camera/sensor setup would be safer than drivers fiddling with an app?
https://www.brusselstimes.com/512118/flemish-traffic-lights-...
> As soon as a driver approaches an intersection with smart traffic lights, a signal is sent via their app and the cloud to the computer controlling those traffic lights.
I'm guessing
No network, red light. /s
I agree theoretically a camera + machine-learning based system could work just as well; I've always wondered why that wasn't standard on traffic lights these days given that the hardware would probably cost a few hundred dollars (if procurement for said hardware were done competently, which I suppose as you said, it probably wouldn't be).
(I would agree that I wouldn't necessarily want fine-grained gps location data being sent to the lowest bidding for-profit traffic light monitoring company.)
Yes. See Palantir for examples.
Other times cars try to kill me to save themselves a few seconds:
1. turning right into a parking lot ahead of me
2. turning right out of the parking lot ahead of me
3. rushing to open their driver's side door right in front of me so they can get out and get to their destination faster
I've had a crash for #1 and #3, so this isn't theoretical. Watch for bicycles.
Right, but the whole premise of this thread is that the lights only turn green after a car approaches. If you overtake the bicycle so you can get there 5s faster, then the light will turn green 5s faster. Sure, whether risking an overtake to save 5s might be questionable, but is at least a more understandable reason than "Some people apparently just can't stand to have anyone driving before them", which makes it sound like the driver can't stand being #2.
Besides there is a good chance you are the one holding up the cyclists creating a mini traffic jam with fellow drivers at every traffic lights.
At a normal traffic light, maybe. But the whole premise of this thread is that the lights that only turn green when a car is approaching.
>Besides there is a good chance you are the one holding up the cyclists creating a mini traffic jam with fellow drivers at every traffic lights.
???
Many cyclists slow down when they see a traffic light being red with a lane of stopped car in front. Because cyclists understand physics and drivers are generally bad at anticipating events.. Almost universally a driver try a quick pass to brake check the cyclists and stop in front of the cyclist while it would be more efficient for both of them to gently slow down instead of stopping so they still have speed when the light go green.
You sound like one of thos drivers who believe it's OK to put other people at risk to save themselves a couple of seconds.
I see this all the time in my large truck that I'm very good at coasting into red lights. Even when there are already vehicles stopped at the light, people will not only stay on the gas way later than necessary and then brake unnecessarily hard but will also pass me to be sitting one car length further ahead at that light. Often it is done dangerously, without turn signals or proper blind spot checks. I know this because I've also almost been hit repeatedly on my motorcycle by cars doing this.
See my other comment. My point isn't that it's suddenly okay to overtake because the driver can shave off 5s, just that the cartoonishly evil caricature of the driver's reasoning that OP dreamed up isn't accurate. Unfortunately, judging by the downvotes it seems like people are interpreting my opposition to OP's claim that "Some people apparently just can't stand to have anyone driving before them" as me arguing that it's fine for drivers to mow down cyclists to save 5s.
"Cartoonishly evil"?!?
I'm pretty sure it is accurate for some subset of the driving population, which was the claim.
> Unfortunately, judging by the downvotes it seems like people are interpreting my opposition to OP's claim that "Some people apparently just can't stand to have anyone driving before them" as me arguing that it's fine for drivers to mow down cyclists to save 5s.
You didn't actually provide any evidence or argument to dispute that claim and completely ignored the key "risky" part of comment.
The way it reads is that you had your feelings hurt by having your bad behavior called out and felt a need to rationalize that behavior.
Their reasoning is as follows:
see cyclist -> cyclist always slow -> must always overtake cyclist
Empirically, 99% of drivers act according to this simplistic model. They do not take the situation at hand into consideration at all, they simply always try to overtake cyclists.
The speed the cyclist is going at doesn't matter, the upcoming intersection/roundabout/traffic jam does not matter, the minimum legal (and safe!) distance from the cyclist while overtaking does not matter.
"How DARE that cyclist slow ME down! Get off the road!" -> punish pass / coal rolling on purpose
The market is too small, and there’s no profit to be made. Unlike the “you could take an Uber” ad in Google Maps.
If it can work as a background App then why not? And if you're in charge of the Google Maps App, you know you'll get blamed for draining the battery and transmitting location data continuously.
It smells like someone in Belgium is lying or is looking for a scapegoat excuse.
The reasoning just doesn't sound right, technically.
Is there an international standard API for this? Perhaps one used mostly for emergency services? Neither Google nor Apple would want to code crap in for every single country's weird features.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/handl...
I'd imagine camera detectors can be tuned for bicyclists as well, but I have less experience with those.
Here's a nice survey of bicycle detection options [1], if you're willing to work with whoever does traffic control near you, this might help get a conversation started. This is focused on US applications, but the ideas should be broadly applicable.
[1] https://altago.com/wp-content/uploads/ALTA_Bike_Detection_Wh...
Didn't work for my 200kg metal motorcycle either most of the time.
He jokes that with how few handicapped people use the features, he could probably give people $1k each as an apology for not being able to go into the building and be far ahead.
I started thinking that for the most part most handicapped people would even take that deal. I think I would.
Adding a loop to bike lanes might be reasonable, or maybe it forces a controller upgrade and that's not reasonable... but if you make the lowest speed through lane and at least one of each protected turn lanes bike accessible (while otherwise doing loop work), that's good. I think the loops are pretty shallow, so if the road has significant rebuild/repair, it's time to address the loop design.
The key word for ADA is reasonable accomodation. It does add expense, and not every feature is used often, but it's 35 years since the ADA passed and the US is a lot more accessible now than it was in 1990. The window of reasonable changes over time too, of course.
It might be true, but that's not the same as "accurate". Let's imagine the same thing but for cyclists:
"I saw a cyclist run a red light and I had to brake to avoid T-boning him. Apparently some cyclists hate motorists and want inconvenience them as much as possible."
I'm sure there's probably "some" radical cyclists that utterly despise motorists (think /r/fuckcars) and want to go out of their to inconvenience them, but only mentioning that as a possible reason for the behavior is at best an act of omission. There's probably some far more innocuous explanation out there, like that the cyclist thought the way was clear (because there were no cars in sight).
>You didn't actually provide any evidence or argument to dispute that claim and completely ignored the key "risky" part of comment.
It's totally fair game to criticize one aspect of a comment even if you agree with the point broadly. For instance, I might not like what facebook's privacy record, but still object to comments that claim that facebook is bad for privacy because it's surreptitiously listening on people's phones.
I don't understand the disctinction you are trying to draw here. The statement itself is both accurate and true? At best the implication might be slightly hyperbolic but definitely not a "cartoonishly evil caricature."
> There's probably some far more innocuous explanation out there, like that the cyclist thought the way was clear (because there were no cars in sight).
Except your explanation is also not innocuous. Not wanting to be behind a bicycle is non an excuse for dangerous passing and especially when you are approaching a red light. The fact that you think this is an acceptable reasoning for that behavior is why you're being called out and downvoted. None of your excuses for how this might cause a light cycle to trigger sooner make this acceptable behavior.