Diverging diamond road interchange in Calgary is Canada’s first

In Chicago, back when street signs were yellow instead of green, there were "green yellow" signals, meaning the green light is about to turn yellow, and "red yellow" signals, meaning the red light is about to turn green. I found those useful, but they probably encouraged bad habits.

 

Yes. I've seen them many places outside the U.S., not just in China.

But here in the U.S., so far, I'm see countdown timers only for pedestrian walk signals.

A few other countries have more imaginative pedestrian indicators, showing a stick figure ambling slowly at first, gradually speeding up to a run. I first saw this in Chile, done very well with a seamless speed-up sequence. Some others seen later in Eastern Europe were not seamless, but had quite abrupt speed transitions.

In some other countries, I see the third element of this family -- "green-red", indicating that the red light is about to turn green.

 

In UK our traffic lights go from red to red and yellow then green. Yellow follows before changing back to red again, so you get an indication when either red or green is about to change.

 

around here, when it switches from red to green, that means it's time to finish your text and begin driving again.

 

For some. For others, it is "just drive it".

 

Correction: I got it wrong, it was really the red-yellow you describe. I've seen it in multiple countries in recent years, much more recently than my only trip to the UK (1999).

At one time, we also had very large numbers of manual transmission cars too. I'd suggest our lack of the red-yellow phase is more of a 'not invented here' thing.

The delay where all lights are red seems to have a lot of variation. In my area, some lights are like that, some have closer to a half-second delay, some (mostly older signals) have no delay at all.

Years ago, another PC poster came from an area where all lights had a 2 second delay, and many locals counted on and made use of that delay to 'safely' run red lights. He got a rude surprise when he encountered a non-delay light elsewhere.

 

Oh yes! Over here the yellow is officially known as Amber and and there are lots of motorists collectively known as Amber Gamblers. The risk being that if you move off during the red + amber light, others crossing may still be charging through on their amber warning, which has caused lots of accidents.

 

In 1952-54 when I was a toddler 2-4 years old, I have a faint memory of the traffic lights visiting yellow between red and green in Stillwater Oklahoma. I'll ask Mom if that was the case.

Bob Wilson

 

When I was a kid we used to have the mantra, Red Stop, Yellow get-ready, Green Go!
But the reality was that the yellow was on simultaneously with the red until switching to green. Yellow on its own long followed green for a few seconds before changing to red. We never let detail get in the way of our mantras when we were kids!