You are being played.
Jarlstrom was informed that he wasn't entitled to hold himself out as an engineer and agreed not to do so. The reasons not to do that are valid, for the simple reason that it pretends to a level of expertise he does not have, when trying to influence how public infrastructure is run.
I have said many times that Jarlstrom could simply have pitched his idea without claiming to be an engineer. Why didn't he? Probably because people did not listen to him as readily if he did not use that title.
what was in discussion was the traffic lights, which was much important
Why is it so important? Only because Jarlstrom says it is and claims that his solution is world-changing. But this is sales talk. If his solution is really that good, then he should be happy to present it as an amateur, without pretensions to qualifications he does not hold.
His proposal sounds OK, but I know nothing of traffic engineering and can't really evaluate it. Neither, I suspect can anyone else except the one person who posted that they are a licensed professional traffic engineer. It's unclear what, if any, assertions Jarlstrom is making about the benefits of implementing his scheme. Will it save any lives or reduce the number of accidents? No idea. All we have is this: '"hen you make a turn you slow down but that's not accounted for in their solution, so people are getting caught in red light cameras for making safe turns.'
OK, I understand he is not crazy about red light tickets because his wife got one when driving around their hometown, but so what? What is so overwhelmingly urgent about this that the Board should make it heir priority? Why doesn't Jarlstrom have the patience to push his idea as a regular driver without making false claims to qualifications he does not in fact possess? I must reiterate that I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with his amateur traffic engineering endeavours...if he would have clearly labeled them as such.
but he is calling himself an engineer to leverage social credibility that attaches to that professional term. I can share my legal opinions with you all day but no matter how well-formed those opinions are it doesn't alter the fact that I am not qualified to practice law, so the only person I could legally represent in court in myself. It would be dishonest of me to label myself as a lawyer, because people who didn't know any better would easily believe me and might create all sorts of problems for themselves by relying on that false belief.
What's going on here is that you heard a sympathetic story about something you think you understand well - who doesn't understand traffic lights, they are so familiar - with an underdog pitted against the image of a large unresponsive bureaucracy. And that is the point at which pany people in this thread have stopped thinking. Look across the thread, there are even people insisting that Jarlstrom is in fact a licensed engineer, repeatedly, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever! People are literally inventing facts to uphold their preferred version of the story.
I am a bit depressed to see how easily people are taken in, and abandon reason in favor of their emotional reaction to a piece of obscure public policy. I have no opinion on the right length of traffic light periods (because I don't drive, thank heavens), and I would have no objection to people evaluating Jarlstrom's proposal and adopting it worldwide. But he chose to go about advancing his proposal in a way that he knew would cause problems, and now he is claiming to be a victim after doing something that he knew in advance would create such a problem.
His legal case will go nowhere because he chose to antagonize the very people who were best-positioned to assist him, for no other reason than to inflate his own ego. It would be wise to ask yourself why the story excluded so many important details about the sequence of events, and perhaps to reread pg's famous Submarine essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html