I have a degree of sympathy for the people who have to time traffic lights. Your job is to maintain flow, but that flow is affected by numerous variables and traffic patterns, and you’ve got to spend a great deal of time fiddling to get it right. So I can understand when the lights are timed in a weird way, it probably makes sense in purely mathematical terms, or it’s the only way to maintain the model. That said, the lights on Broadway are set up in a very strange way.
The issue is the way the advance left is set up. For the majority of the streets, you have potential left turns in both directions so it makes sense that coming out of a red light you have both sides do a left turn. Great, on many of the streets, except if you’re at 2nd Ave and Broadway, at which point the setup gets weird. Here it is also a case where both sides of the street stop for red lights, except the lane going east is waiting for nothing. If the westbound lane turns left, they are driving into a park, which means they are probably drunk and should be arrested. It feels like a glitch in the system, a light programmed in the same way as the other lights on the same road, but here the programming makes no sense. Why are people waiting here? What purpose does their inability to move serve?
But I have sympathy, because this is the only intersection that wouldn’t have a left turn in both directions, and it’s in the middle. Changing up how the intersection at second works would mess with the timing of the other lights. What you would have is the traffic which is let go at 2nd Ave immediately having to stop again for the lights on 3rd, and then you have the backlog that results because of the way people react to traffic lights as a rule – a long line means it takes a relatively long period of time for the entire line to get moving again. So actually breaking up traffic into two segments with an unnecessary stop might actually do well for traffic flow, as annoying as it is to drivers.
My sympathy for whoever is timing that light is dimmed when I drive through the rest of the city, however. The lights on Smith Street don’t seem to be interested in traffic flow at all, plus they always seem to make you stop just long enough to make you start to question if there isn’t a problem somewhere. Then you have the intersection at Hamilton Road and Highway 9, which will occasionally get confused and just not let people through, as I once discovered when it decided that nobody needed to travel east one day and spent at least 15 minutes only allowing left turns but no through traffic – I don’t know how long it took overall, because at a certain point I just turned left to end the pain.
The timing, programming and implementation of traffic lights is not an easy process, I can admit that readily, I’m sure that if I programmed the system people would be irritated, there would be long waits at lights, traffic flow would be compromised and the whole thing would be a minor disaster. Unfortunately, having said that, I’m not sure that it would be so different from the way the lights are set up today, as can be evidenced by the fact that this column exists. The lights aren’t all bad, the prevalence of advance left turns is something to be emulated, but the programming is still far from perfect.
