Designer Thanva Tivawong has put out an interesting concept for traffic control signal lights – using the idea of a digital hour glass! The same colors as we're used to appear in Thanva's design – green for go, amber/yellow for warning, and red for stop.
Red apparently also means "go ahead and barrel through the intersection, being a douche and almost always nearly causing an accident." It does at least here in Oklahoma City, and almost nowhere in the world as bad as Dallas, Texas. Damn, people.
Check out these images of the concept – and thanks, Daphne, for sending these my way!
I like the concept but it won't work because some people are color blind.
This seems like a cool concept but I think it has a few fatal flaws which will keep it from being adopted. The first is that the yellow appears twice in a cycle. Motorists won't know if they are coming up on an intersection about to go green and they should slow down, or if they are coming up on an intersection about to go red that they should rush through. It could create some very hazardous situations. But, with this system, is the yellow even needed? It currently serves the purpose of warning about a light to go red, if they hour glass for green was almost empty this would do the same thing the yellow used to.
The other big issue I see is how would color blind people navigate the lights?
Ever been to the UK? The lights there go green->yellow->red->yellow->. Why? Manual cars.
Yeah, good idea….not. The whole point of traffic lights is they are a signal not a TV i.e lights in different positions so even colour blind people can read them.
It is in fact very unusual to see no colour at all and achromatopia is linked to a defficiency in visual acuity which effectively excludes them from driving. It does work for anyone who can make a clear distiction between red, yellow and green. You may have herad of partial colourblindness and may have heard that the red-green type is quite common but in fact weakness to a colour is more common than blindness, most common is weakness to green.
As this is an LED traffic light, the aspect meaing stop wolud be very red and that meaing go would be very green so even Red-Green colourweak people would be able to tell the difference between them, and normally wolud have no trouble with the yellow either.