Physicist in North Carolina studied traffic lights throughout North Carolina and Virginia, and the results might surprise you. It appears that these traffic lights are a money making trap that can’t be avoided for drivers in turning lanes.
The amount of time the traffic light stays yellow makes it impossible for drivers near the light to make a full stop or complete a turn before turning red.
Using Newton’s Laws of Motion, the physicists determined that the lights should stay yellow for almost double the time in order to give drivers time to react.
So how could this happen? The traffic engineering handbook had a error in their yellow light formula since the 1950s and has been continued to be used since. For decades, many drivers would pass the intersection a fraction of a second late, with little to no consequence.
That is until red light camera came into play. With these cameras snapping photos the moment a light turns red, it’s a money trap that near unavoidable.
“For 40 years, the errors were there, but we never knew about it,” said Dr. Shovelin, one of the leading physicists that lead the study. “It’s not until you put in the red-light cameras going 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, catching everybody who is a tenth of second off.”
[WTKR]