Traffic lights drive you mad. Or robots, as they are quaintly called in South Africa. Sometimes the whole intersection is idling, waiting for pedestrian lights even though there aren't any pedestrians. Or the lights are green for the cross road but no cars are there, meanwhile there's a bunch of cars waiting on your side. Tests are now being conducted in Harris County, Texas to combine smart lights with vehicles' new anti-idling systems to calculate the flows at intersections. This system also makes use of drivers' cellphones, like Waze does for traffic densities. Already in place is the Scoot technology used on many of the 4000 traffic signals in London and 250 of the 1200 lights in Cape Town. Cape Town Council claims its Scoot system saves motorists R30 million in 'operating and time costs'. That may be so but I can think of loads of intersections where there seems to be a lot of pointless idling and waiting, burning up gas and time. And it's often for those invisible pedestrians. I can remember in Cape Town years ago a system of rubber strips on the road that recorded flow and sent this to the light, which would then react. Many lights had them and they seemed to work pretty well. They've gone now. A case where new technology has retrogressed from old technology. The QSL is from KYOK, Houston in Harris County Texas. They were using just 5 kW on AM 1590, heard in Morgan Bay, South Africa in 1993.
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