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The Dallas Morning News Tony Hartzel Column: Late-Night Red Lights Drive People to the Brink

Posted on: Monday, 22 May 2006, 00:05 CDT

By Tony Hartzel, The Dallas Morning News

May 21--Nothing can frustrate a late-night driver like the 2 a.m. red light.

At a time when most drivers have gone to bed, many traffic signals around town still perform their green-yellow-red job.

Technology has changed in recent years. We now have magnets embedded in pavement. When cars drive over these so-called "loops," the light changes from red to green sooner.

The other option is to have signals flash red or yellow during late-night hours.

Traffic engineers have wrestled with this issue since the 1960s.

"This isn't a new question," said Kent Kacir, a regional manager for Siemens ITS in Plano, who studied the need for flashing signals while with the Texas Transportation Institute in the 1990s. "We always seem to keep coming back to this."

Some data suggest that waits at traffic lights can be cut in half if signals are switched from automatic detection to flashing red or yellow. That would save a motorist about five to seven seconds per traffic light. The savings could be more at intersections that don't have loops.

With the convenience of flashing lights comes the possibility for more intersection crashes, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Researchers with that agency recommend not using flashing lights at intersections that have an unusually high rate of crashes.

In some cases, researchers found that converting traffic signals from flashing to standard operation reduced crashes 78 to 95 percent.

(In an interesting side note, those researchers also found that the number of intersection crashes increased in the hour after bars closed. Go figure.)

Still, motorists like flashing lights because they save time, said Mr. Kacir, who presented his research to a local meeting of the Institute of Transportation Engineers.

"It's a balancing act between safety and efficiency," he said.

Motorists despise getting stuck alone under the eerie red glow of a traffic light late at night.

"A minute at night feels like an eternity when no one else is around," said Mr. Kacir. "Generally speaking, most people obey the signals. But if it's a minute or two, they lose patience."

Mr. Kacir would not discuss his late-night driving habits. I admit to cursing my luck when I get stuck at late-night red lights. Although I've never run a red light in that case, I have performed a vehicle dance of sorts in which I have backed up and driven over traffic detectors several times in an often-futile attempt to outwit the green-yellow-red machine.

At those times, I often long for the flashing lights, particularly at intersections close to my home.

The decision whether to use flashing lights varies city to city, and even from intersection to intersection. Many Dallas-area cities still use flashing traffic signals, particularly in downtown areas or at intersections without loops. In cases where motorists' views may be obscured, flashing traffic signals may not be the best answer.

Flashing lights also may be more common in cities where the loops are broken and not repaired, Mr. Kacir said.

"The jury is still out from jurisdiction to jurisdiction on whether they're going to flash or not," he said. "A lot of it is just engineering judgment."

Tony Hartzel can be reached at thartzel@dallasnews.com and at P.O. Box 655237, Dallas, Texas 75265.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News

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Source: The Dallas Morning News

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