http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/oct/27/cyclists-run-red-lights-paris-london-san-francisco

I hadn’t thought about it before, but jumping red lights, especially to turn left, seems like an incredibly sensible thing to do. Looks like I’m not alone in thinking this.

Agree with it, just hope they/we look first before we take/make the turn.

it will be chaos to start with ….the brits dont like or understand change on the whole…..

but the crazy americans manage to make it work 😀

I did it this morning, gasp shock horror. I know the lights well and I looked and it was 6.15 am so not exactly many cars around.

It’s a great idea and doesn’t seem to cause any real problems in North America (only they turn right, obviously)

If you read the article, the suggestion is that you would still have to give way to other traffic, which is the sensible way to treat a red light on a bicycle. The point is that if it was only bicycles on the road there would be no need for traffic lights, as they’re capable of interacting without them (see “all green” phase for bicycles used at some traffic lights in Holland). Traffic lights are only needed to control the flow of cars through junctions – not to avoid accidents, but to manage traffic flow.

The only reason for cyclists to obey traffic lights on a strict basis is to avoid the “cyclists don’t obey the rules” image, but then that makes little difference to drivers’ attitudes anyway.

All it would do is formalise something which happens so regularly anyway it’s barely worth worrying about. Bikes can flow and merge with traffic without any problems at all. Same as pedestrians – they seem to get around on pavements quite happily!

I’d be more in favour of fixing traffic lights so that while they can operate to a set sequence during the day, at times of little/no traffic they just turn to flashing amber.

The number of times I drive at night, get to some little village and have to sit there for 3 minutes while the lights go through their pre-set green for this way, green for that way, pedestrian phases… It’s incredibly frustrating.

All the research show that if you hand back some of the decision making to drivers, speeds decrease (ie, it’s safer) but traffic flows increase and you still get to your destination quicker.

It would improve things for those of us who want to obey the rules.

If you listen carefully you can hear journalists already backing the outrage bus out of the garage

Traffic controlled pedestrian crossings highlight how depersonalizing car transport is. Drivers wait at a crossing with a red light showing when there is no one to cross, yet drive through on green when someone is waiting to cross. Its deeply strange – it’s the sort of things they do to train torturers so they have less empathy with their victims

In Wolverhampton the red lights are purely advisory

If you listen carefully you can hear journalists already backing the outrage bus out of the garage

The Daily Wail offices will spontaneously combust pretty soon, that ticks nearly every box!

just about the only rule US have right. I’d be worried about lorry and cyclist interactions to start with, but think that the rule is sensible.

I reckon there’s an argument to be made that it might decrease the number of women crushed by lorries.

I find the only problem it causes, is that if there are two lanes of traffic…both are able to go straight on, but both are able also to go left or right respectively…it means anyone trying to go straight on ‘blocks’ the left hand lane on red. This is particularly shit though if the right turn is a short feeder light.

Wonder if there’ll be a blip increase of left hook incidents while we adjust. More cyclists inclined to go up the left of a vehicle when they are planning to turn left on red…and the lights change as they are undertaking.

Or do we think those incidents will be overshadowed by the reduced number of cyclists being at the head of the queue when the lights change?

I do think it’s progress tho.

<edit>Joe won’t cyclists (the only people allowed to turn left on red) be able to get around anyone “blocking” the LH lane?

Traffic controlled pedestrian crossings highlight how depersonalizing car transport is. Drivers wait at a crossing with a red light showing when there is no one to cross, yet drive through on green when someone is waiting to cross. Its deeply strange – it’s the sort of things they do to train torturers so they have less empathy with their victims

That’s a local authority problem, though. Arla has given so much money in backhanders to Aylesbury that every set of pedestrian crossings has been rewired to encourage people to drive.

– Turn up at crossing.
– Push button.
– Wait 90 seconds while the radar looks for a gap in the traffic.
– You see the same gap and cross the road.
– Lights turn red with no one there.
– Cars get angry.

And don’t get me started on the junctions where the button doesn’t do anything. Or the fact that mini-cab drivers in Aylesbury have clearly never done the “what does a red light mean?” bit of the driving test. Or roundabouts where it is physically impossible to cross at busy times because there are no lights or zebra crossing. The response from the council when I took this up with them was to suggest that I walk a quarter of a mile down the road to a crossing, then back up again to the roundabout.

At one junctions last week the lights turned to green when I was still half way across. Instead of letting me get across the road, the car at the red light just drove at me. To be fair, they now has a new foot-sized dent in the bumper. 😈

More cyclists inclined to go up the left of a vehicle when they are planning to turn left on red…and the lights change as they are undertaking.

That’s my worry.

At the moment if I get to the lights and they are on red, and there isn’t a big queue, I won’t bother filtering at all. I’ll get through on the next green phase anyway so I just sit at the back of the queue. If I know that it’s legal for me to turn left while the other traffic waits I suspect that I’d be more inclined to filter up to the front.

And yes, I know the risks and would hope that I’d restrain myself if there was a lorry or something at the front, but I can see how it would potentially increase the risk to me. (If I habitually filtered anyway and waited at the front it would potentially decrease it, admittedly).

I think you’d have a steady stream of cyclists turning left against the red light. So by the time the lights went green, all the cyclists would have gone.

And if there were so many cyclists that there were still some left, then no lorry driver could possibly miss them (I’d like to think anyway).

So it’s actually our civic duty to jump red lights and save lives!

Shielded turn on red – perfectly sensible.

However there has to be an aligned rule of “pedestrians have right of way over all turning traffic”. I nearly got run over a few times when I first came here assuming that was the rule ! But no, car is king.

– Turn up at crossing.
– Push button.
– Wait 90 seconds while the radar looks for a gap in the traffic.
– You see the same gap and cross the road.
– Lights turn red with no one there.
– Cars get angry.

there’s one on my commute like this (BW crossing), annoys the shit out of me.
As does the crossroads one right near my house linked to the traffic light phase and roughly a third of the times I use it it misses the pedestrian phase. Dunno if there’s a lockout several seconds before the ped phase is due to start so button press is ignored, or what. Have contacted council they say it’s working fine.

However there has to be an aligned rule of “pedestrians have right of way over all turning traffic”.

Think we already have that, its just roundly ignored.

it will be chaos to start with ….the brits dont like or understand change on the whole…..

This x100, the culture shock and complaints when you tweak the rules for “experienced drivers” almost makes it not worth the bother…

Done it all my life.

Why obey stupid laws blindly? 😕

Thanks for the reminder – have just contacted the helpful chap at the council again about re-instating the changes he made to the local ped crossing which did make it work a lot more sensibly (obviously the cars still have priority, but we got rid of needlessly waiting for a green light when the cars were on a red phase anyway – sadly it’s now reverted to stupid behaviour).

This x100, the culture shock and complaints when you tweak the rules for “experienced drivers” almost makes it not worth the bother…

Yes, you should have seen the amount of vitriol and predictions of chaos and disaster poured at the Poynton Shared Space scheme!

Now that it’s been in place for a while…

http://www.macclesfield-express.co.uk/news/local-news/traders-share-success-poynton-shared-2526261

It’s not perfect but it’s a lot better than what was there and has gone some way towards realigning the “car is king” mentality.

hels – Member

However there has to be an aligned rule of “pedestrians have right of way over all turning traffic”. I nearly got run over a few times when I first came here assuming that was the rule !

It almost is the rule (HWC170, watch out for pedestrians crossing a road into which you are turning. If they have started to cross they have priority, so give way)

but also

But no, car is king.

so is this.

It’s a great idea and doesn’t seem to cause any real problems in North America

Even in the US, with their wide open spacious junctions and buildings far back from the road, there are many ‘no right turn on red’ signs even for the cars, because it’s not appropriate given the junction.

You’d have to assess every significant junction to make sure it was sensible, and disallow it where it’s not.

That Guardian article mentions, but doesn’t link to, the “ride to rule” protest in San Francisco that looked like an excellent idea:

http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/07/30/this-is-what-happened-when-bicyclists-obeyed-traffic-laws-along-the-wiggle-yesterday

Edit: They do, just further down, oops…

My oh my the Guardian website comments make some depressing reading. Britain’s car drivers are so biblically unaware of their imperfections and the transgressions of their peers – was it Jung who said “the loudest voices in our head are the lies we tell ourselves”. 😥

I thought the Guardian was the champion of tolerance? Apparently some of its readership is far less so.

I would be in favour of the change BUT I don’t see it happening. Sadly the “Car” voice is too vocal and the authorities not sufficiently forward thinking or invested in improving things. Central and local government see it as a vote loser so there’s no motivation.

If the evidence from other countries shows it works then I vote for a trial.
This is true, however…

it will be chaos to start with ….the brits dont like or understand change on the whole…..

there’ll be all kinds of teeth gnashing – LTDA will be straight up with a legal challenge for one…

We’ll also need clear communications to the ‘great’ British driving public just to make sure they understand the reasons for it, or we’ll just see a massive increase in their expert confirmation bias that ‘I see even more cyclists running red lights than I used to’ therefore it’s my right to harass as many of them as I can get away with’

Northwind – if only people knew about that one. I had a taxi speed up towards me last week when he sped round the corner and I had the audacity to already be on the road, walking, next to a kids park, behind a junior school. As he skimmed my jeans he turned the next corner whilst glowering at me through his side window, not where he was going which was towards the school. He then stopped 40m down the road for his pick up. Tool.

– Turn up at crossing.
– Push button.

Because the button has removed the need to think

More cyclists inclined to go up the left of a vehicle when they are planning to turn left on red…and the lights change as they are undertaking.
That’s my worry.

At the moment if I get to the lights and they are on red, and there isn’t a big queue, I won’t bother filtering at all. I’ll get through on the next green phase anyway so I just sit at the back of the queue. If I know that it’s legal for me to turn left while the other traffic waits I suspect that I’d be more inclined to filter up to the front.

And yes, I know the risks and would hope that I’d restrain myself if there was a lorry or something at the front, but I can see how it would potentially increase the risk to me. (If I habitually filtered anyway and waited at the front it would potentially decrease it, admittedly).

I tend to run red lights when the road is clear and I can see well enough to know it will remain so, but I won’t filter if there isn’t space. Don’t really see this as making it happen more.

Because the button has removed the need to think

I’m sorry, let me bow to your intellectual superiority in the matters of how to use a pedestrian crossing and beg that you share the secret to crossing a road.

I’m sorry, let me bow to your intellectual superiority in the matters of how to use a pedestrian crossing and beg that you share the secret to crossing a road.

No, he’s right.
Road users (be it peds, cyclists, drivers) are all conditioned from an early age. Green Cross Code, red lights and then ever more signage and infrastructure designed to keep us over here or following this line or that route.

It’s just a society of sheep, unthinkingly obeying signage, unable to cope if there aren’t signs and paint telling you what to do, where to go, how to behave.

There are situations where that is needed (at least in part) – areas that have evolved into busy thoroughfares with various different transport modes all competing for space.

Equally, you can reverse engineer it. Trams share pedestrianised areas in Manchester very successfully without any red lights or fences. People are quite capable of crossing roads without marked out pedestrian crossings (and even when there are marked out crossing zones, peds will regularly “jump red lights” and cross as and when it’s safe to do so)
The proposed rule change around left turns on red lights isn’t much different.

No, he’s right.
Road users (be it peds, cyclists, drivers) are all conditioned from an early age. Green Cross Code, red lights and then ever more signage and infrastructure designed to keep us over here or following this line or that route.

It’s just a society of sheep, unthinkingly obeying signage, unable to cope if there aren’t signs and paint telling you what to do, where to go, how to behave.

+ 1

The Naked Road experiments in the Netherlands and also Exhibition Road in Kensington are all about removing all the signs and infrastructure so people have no idea where to go when driving, walking etc. This lack of clear guidance is expected to force people to look, assess and then make up their own mind how to act safely rather than blindly assuming it’s ok because the signs and lights tell them it is.

It’s about taking people away from unconscious incompetence and into conscious competence, which is classic learning methodology…

Look at all the stories of people with sat nav driving into bridges and harbours and all the pedestrians walking into the road with their eyes on their phones if you want to see how incompetent a lot of people have become at assessing risk on the roads because they’re so used to it being done for them…

All for this.

Also agree that managed junctions aren’t necessary 24/7, treat crossings outside of peak times as Zebras and junctions as free flowing. Every time I get to a junction with the lights out I wonder in amazement at how easily things flow when people are left to their own devices.

This sounds really sensible….and therefore will not happen…

It’s just a society of sheep, unthinkingly obeying signage, unable to cope if there aren’t signs and paint telling you what to do, where to go, how to behave.

That’s a load of bollocks. Every other thread here is about how people AREN’T obeying the rules of the road, crossing wherever and on red men, and now you’re saying we’re all sheep doing as we’re told. Anyone would think you are just looking for an argument to make rather than observing reality.

I thought they’d given up on that in the Netherlands, because they found the same as what I’ve seen about Exhibition road – that far from everybody being equal, it just results in the biggest and fastest having priority over everybody else, with pedestrians taking their lives in their hands. Because we don’t have the culture of giving way to the weakest which is what is needed for this to work properly. This is of course where presumed liability would help a bit.