200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
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Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#2Demand traffic lights using a loop sensor that can pick up a car through magnetism are nothing new. They can be a problem for cyclists because many bikes don't have enough metal.
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.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#3Demand traffic lights using a loop sensor that can pick up a car through magnetism are nothing new. They can be a problem for cyclists because many bikes don't have enough metal. 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…
Note that here they are working via phone apps, so if you are navigating with a local navigation app like Karta GPS, Flitsmeister or Sway, these apps can let the lights know you are heading that way and will be there in X minutes. Therefore this approach is not _really_ car centered and also works for bikes or any alternative form of transportation. If I read between the lines of the article, the system was developed for emergency services first, but is now expanded.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#4Demand traffic lights using a loop sensor that can pick up a car through magnetism are nothing new. They can be a problem for cyclists because many bikes don't have enough metal. 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…
Note that here they are working via phone apps, so if you are navigating with a local navigation app like Karta GPS, Flitsmeister or Sway, these apps can let the lights know you are heading that way and will be there in X minutes. Therefore this approach is not _really_ car centered and also works for bikes or any alternative form of transportation. If I read between the lines of the article, the system was developed…
That seems an over-engineered, highly expensive and complicated to maintain on a road-lifetime scale system
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#5I think it would actually be better if they refuse to integrate with the large apps, and instead use the green activation as a feature to entice people away from those apps.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#6"We want to be present on the apps that people already use" How can they not see that an app for traffic lights is clearly the wrong approach? Smart traffic lights are working great in many countries without needing an app for them to work.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#7Flemish EMT here. There were a lot of privacy concerns for emergency services when this came out, and my service is in fact not using it on most ambulances. The same concerns were hand-waved away when it came to apps for regular drivers. It would not surprise me if that played a role for Google Maps/Waze not to support it. Or the market is too small here to be worth implementing.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#8This is solving the wrong problem. If a traffic light can turn green at a whim, for any arriving app user, the intersection is not busy enough to have a traffic light. Then the traffic light should be removed or switched off for those times, instead of getting a very expensive (I presume) upgrade. If the intersection is busy enough so that people are waiting on all (or most) stop lines, then simpler traffic density sensors are a better, less invasive, far cheaper, and more privacy-preserving option.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#9In Melbourne, Australia, a long time ago, they embedded weight sensors in the road for a lot of intersections, so they can react dynamically to traffic conditions.
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.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#10I wonder what technology they're using to back this. The Netherlands has a system not too dissimilar to this (seemingly mostly marketed towards bikes) with wide scale deployment in cities: https://map.udap.nl/app/viewer/subjects?subjectTypeId=TRAFFI...
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.