Flashing Amber Traffic Lights at Night - do it work?

In my local area, Silver Spring MD, they move the lights to flashing amber late at night. To my knowledge it works really well. I know it makes the late night drive home a lot easier... a lot less stop and go.

 

I think it works very well. So well, in fact, that I have tried to cajole the highway department to apply it to a particular light where there is lots of daytime traffic and almost none at night. Of course they haven't responded or done anything.

Richard

 

It's always irritating hitting a red light at 3:00 in the morning and having to wait for the signal to cycle through to green when you're in the only car with its engine running on the deserted streets. Fortunately that doesn't happen often, usually because I'm rarely out on the road at 3AM, but it's also very uncommon to find signals that don't switch to flashing amber on the busier street and flashing red on the cross street, generally making the switch between 11PM & 2AM, depending on the setting (suburban, downtown, rural, etc.).

Sometimes both streets are set to flash amber, but that's asking for trouble - one has to flash red to maintain control over the intersection. Setting both to flashing amber is the same as turning them all off (well, not quite - when signals are off they automatically become stop signs - although at 3AM you might not even see a dead traffic light).

Sometimes both are set to flash red, forcing a stop but at least you don't have to wait and it's the wait that's irritating.

I imagine at night lots of people just run the red lights after stopping when they don't see any traffic, or make a quick left turn followed by an immediate U-turn and then left again back on the original direction on the other side of the intersection - both maneuvers increasing risk rather than decreasing it, so I think the flashing amber/red system probably improves safety. (Those would be right turns here in the US, by the way, but we don't need to do them because so many of our lights are already amber/red at night).

 

All of the non-major intersections around here flash amber in one direction and red in the other somewhere around midnight. I do not know of ever reading or hearing anything in the paper or on TV/radio about any issues with this.

I know when leaving very early or coming home very late from work that it is nice driving across town without having to stop for lights.

 

The smart thing to do is introduce it slowly and see the results. Would this shift be massive or phased?

One strong advantage is the flashing light naturally attracts attention. That's exactly what you want at night in slow areas. The only thing to be forbidden is flashing amber in both directions, that's asking for accidents.

 

I've seen the flashing red/amber at night, and it seems to work quite well. On rare ocassion when the lights are out completely, people should revert to four-way stop procedures, but not everyone plays nice.

One night time change around here is to turn off the pedestrian beep-boop. The white walk signal still comes on, but not the noise, which could get very annoying at night, especially in summer with the windows open.

 

It works well here. It's only used at intersections where late night traffic is light.

In the county where I live we only have flashing traffic lights. We don't have enough traffic to warrant fully sequencing traffic lights. Ours work like stop signs, only they are more obvious.

Tom

 

No such thing in my area. Almost all of our traffic lights have sensors on the road. They work most of the time. If they don't work, people just run the red light. There are traffic lights around my area that I ran red lights all the time when there are not other cars around. Flashing brights sometimes get the lights to turn green but not all the time.