How do traffic signals work? (2019)

Περίληψη

If you live in a major city, I can take a pretty good guess at one of your most common frustrations: traffic. In city driving, the journey is rarely better than the destination. In most cases, we just want to get where we’re going. Traffic is not just frustrating, but it has consequences to the environment as well. All those idling vehicles have an impact on air quality. When you’re stuck and sitting behind a long line of cars, it’s easy to let your mind wander over solutions to our traffic woes. But, traffic management in dense urban areas is an extremely complex problem with a host of conflicting goals and challenges. One of the most fundamental of those challenges happens at an intersection, where multiple streams of traffic - including vehicles, bikes and pedestrians - need to safely, and with any luck, efficiently, cross each others’ paths. Over the years we’ve developed quite a few ways to manage this challenge of who gets to go and who gets to wait, from simple signs to roundabo...