Just so I understand, you are under the impression that 0 seconds is the appropriate time required to stop, which would obviously be the case if your car was moving legally at the speed limit at the edge of the road when the green light immediately changed to a red light.
No, you're missing his point. He's talking about safety, not avoiding fines. If lights go straight from green to red, but then wait 60 seconds before any other traffic goes from red to green, then it won't cause any safety issues, because even if a handful of cars can't stop in time when it goes red, there won't be any other traffic around. Off course it could cause problems with cars going in the same direction stopping too quickly, but the assumption is that cars won't just slam on their breaks as soon as they see the red light (and let's not forget this is also the hypothetical in which there is no orange light).
This line of discussion is unrelated to whether or not they should be trying to maximise fines.
Yellow means "stop if safe". Red means "stop", but when driving "if safe" is always implied. I've driven through red lights to let emergency vehicles through, and a judge would likely throw out a ticket given for such a reason.
Yellow lights increase safety by avoiding the "slam on the brakes" effect you've described. They've replaced this with a very common "floor the accelarator" reaction which also decreases safety. How do you get one without the other? Red light cameras combined with a short yellow seem the best approach to me.
>Yellow lights increase safety by avoiding the "slam on the brakes" effect you've described. They've replaced this with a very common "floor the accelarator" reaction which also decreases safety.
In a typical car, flooring the gas pedal is conservatively going to be about 9ft/s² in the same direction as you're already moving. Slamming on the brakes is going to accelerate you at about 15ft/s² in the opposite direction as you're already moving. The effects these two actions have on safety are not comparable
>Red light cameras combined with a short yellow seem the best approach to me.
Except that that approach has been conclusively demonstrated to increase both accidents and fatalities, while lengthening yellow lights has been shown to reduce both accidents and fatalities.
