How do traffic lights time or decide when to display their colors (red/green/yellow)?
In: Technology
Depending location, there’s basically 3 systems.
First, a simple timer is rigged up to the lights of the intersection. Be green for X amount of time in this direction, then be green for X amount of in the other direction. Simple.
For areas like suburbs where a lot of the traffic occurs at certain times (and/or one road needs to be prioritized over the other), they build sensors into the road surface. These can tell when there’s a car waiting for a green light (or several cars, depending on placement) and triggers the lights to change. It’s basically so that the lights only change when someone needs them to, so the flow of traffic on the busier road doesn’t get disrupted as much.
In really busy places like major cities, there’s an entire network that runs the traffic signals from a computer based on minute to minute traffic patterns. This is the optimal way to deal with tons of traffic because they can spread cars out more and help alleviate logjams by preventing more cars from getting into the mix.
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