The TRUTH About Traffic Lights – This Will Surprise You
Did you know that traffic lights at intersections kill more people in the US every year than terrorism lightning and shark attacks combined traffic lights those ubiquitous devices that are supposed to make our road safer and traffic smoother are causing
Thousands of deaths and injuries every year how can that possibly be true well it turns out after some digging there’s a lot to talk about here so let’s see if we can’t figure this
Out together and see if there’s a better way of doing things I’m Ricky and this is Two bit da Vinci this video is sponsored by PDS debt let’s start with some context a couple of months ago one of
My friends brought this up in passing that traffic lights were killing drivers and pedestrians and that kind of statement is going to catch your attention how could something designed and engineered to save us possibly be doing more harm than good I can’t remember exactly how
The conversation ended but in my head I knew I got to make a YouTube video about this the first thing that crossed my mind was okay let’s say it’s true how do you prove it I knew we had
To look for statistics and crashes and what I found was pretty shocking the first thing I saw was that the US is a world leader when it comes to traffic related fatalities we’re number one there are roughly 43,000 deaths by traffic accident in the US every year that’s about 120 deaths
Every single day for an average of 129 deaths per million of population with the exception of China that’s the highest rate in the industrial world that’s almost five times higher than the UK heck it’s even worse than Russia and if you’ve ever seen those videos on Instagram and Tik Tok you
Know how bad driving in Russia can be and of all of those deadly crashes about one in four happens at intersections 10,600 now this kind of does make sense even though they make a small fraction of
All roadways intersections are where you’re most likely to hit another car head on or get hit from the side making it more dangerous it’s also where pedestrians and bicyclists usually cross the road
And have a higher risk of running into a car so as an engineer the next question has to be how many of those 10,600 deaths happen at intersections with and without traffic lights That’s The $64,000 Question and after digging around a little bit I found that roughly 7,000 debts involved unsignaled
Intersections while only about 3,000 involved signaled ones AKA intersections with traffic lights so then I thought my friend was wrong it looks like signaled intersections are actually safer less deps than the ones that aren’t it seems like traffic lights are saving us and not
The other way around but unfortunately there’s a catch but whenever you have raw numbers you have to try to normalize it right because how many intersections in the US are signaled and how many are unsignaled well I researched that and I figured it out there are about 3 million
Unsignaled intersections right that means yield signs or stop signs two-way four fourway versus only 300,000 intersections with a traffic light that means that there are 10 times more unsignaled intersections than signal ones so then if you normalize the data right between the two that for
Every 1 million UNS signal intersections there are about 2,300 deaths per year but there are 10,000 deaths per year for signaled intersections so intersections with traffic lights kill drivers four times more than intersections without them and the worst part was looking at these numbers
Traffic light intersections are particularly deadly at killing pedestrians and motorcyclist here in the US so in the interest of being thorough I had one more thing to check what if we had the information backward what if really dangerous intersections were dangerous and as
A result people installed traffic lights and well they were still dangerous but before we get into that there’s another problem that many are facing and that’s the debt crisis happening in the US and abroad and I have some good news because our sponsor pey debt solutions has got
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Steps to Rising above debt huge thanks to PDS debt and you for supporting the show so traffic lights are the consequence of a dangerous intersection an attempt to try to fix it and sometimes they don’t but that would be really difficult to prove because you would need data for a
Dangerous intersection before traffic lights were installed and then data after they were installed that isn’t particularly that easy to find but there’s good news because someone else already did the inverse experiment at a large scale in a town called Carmel Indiana instead of installing
Traffic lights and tracking fatality rates before and after they tracked fatality rates before and after swapping traffic lights for a different type of intersection a low Tech but highly effective solution I’ll get back to in a minute I promise for now just know that the experiment worked like
A charm proving that traffic lights are causing more crashes and not the other way around so we can now ask ourselves confidently why are traffic lights killing people pedestrians in particular I found many possible reasons some stronger than others Americans drive a lot more than people in
Other countries more driving means more exposure to traffic risk especially at intersections where Vehicles interact with pedestrians and other vehicles but driving more isn’t the only reason why intersections in America are so dangerous other factors contribute to the problem such as
The type of vehicles the design of the road and the behavior of the drivers in America we love big powerful and fast cars especially SUVs that combine the features of a car and a
Truck SUVs are very popular here in the US and they count for 46% of all new car sales in the country in 2022 but SUVs are also very dangerous especially for pedestrians they’re more than twice
As likely to kill a pedestrian than a car in a crash because you get hit on the chest and sometimes pulled underneath whereas a car that’s lower to the ground often will have you get flung onto the windshield where you roll out of the way there’s other considerations too the weight of the
SUV is always higher which means more momentum more energy coming into a collision and finally worse performance in terms of breaking taking all that mass and coming to a stop in time the biggest factor in terms of driver Behavior with traffic lights is something that we can all relate
To if we drive cars which is while they’re made to keep us safer by turning from red yellow and green yellow meaning slow down come to a stop because we’re about to turn red often times it does the exact opposite suddenly when you know the light is turning yellow and you don’t want
To be late for work or dropping off your kid you speed up and others are seeing their light turn green while you’re trying to rush through the intersection that really is at the heart of this problem it’s a bad incentive structure in 2010 1,53 people 57 of them pedestrians lost
Their lives in traffic accidents involving red lights and Road design also plays a major role in the US roads are designed to accommodate high-speed traffic and large Vehicles which makes them less safe and less friendly for pedestrians or cyclists but how on Earth
Could you possibly redesign an intersection to make it safer the Federal Highway Administration knows full well how dangerous intersections are and they’ve designed multiple different types of intersections like always stop intersections with stop signs on all Corners median U-turn intersections with bikeways and enhanced midblock Crossing intersections with separate bike Lanes
Or with side paths and many more the main goal of all these designs is to reduce the three main risk factors for Collision conflict points which are points where traffic merges or intersects when doing a left turn vehicle speed and collision angle on a traditional intersection of two
Lane roadways there are a total of 32 potential conflict points where you could crash or hit a pedestrian now some of those intersection designs that we mentioned are huge because they can cut the conflict points in half to 16 but there is one intersection design that rules them all pun
Intended enter the roundabout a roundabout is a circular intersection where traffic flows counterclockwise around a center Island at least for right-and Drive countries traffic approach in the roundabout yields to traffic already in the circular roadway the roundabout is an impressively
Simple and elegant solution to intersections of all shapes and sizes in a roundabout since traffic flows counterclockwise the central island is always to the left so there are no leftand turns the opposite is also true for countries like India and the UK where you drive on the left side
Of the road everything just gets flipped the total number of conflict points or potential points of Collision in a four-lane roundabout reduces from 32 to just eight and that is a huge reduction in the conflict points furthermore you always enter a roundabout at an angle from the right there’s no
Right angle collisions unless you aim straight at the central island but beyond that having a central island right in front of you and having to negotiate with other drivers to enter the central ring forces you to drive slower and to make more eye contact and to just generally be more aware
Of your surroundings now you’re just a single fish in a school you have to kind kind of play nicely with others so in essence the roundabout tackles everything that makes an intersection dangerous and it does it well remember this is just a design feature in the roadway not some high-tech traffic
Control device or algorithm roundabout works on every kind of weather from hurricanes to snowstorms to droughts or anything in between it doesn’t require any form of energy so it to work day or night even if the power goes down how annoying is it when those intersections with
Traffic lights with power goes out or there’s any kind of disruption and they’re all just flashing red now that completely bogs down traffic it’s kind of a nightmare so at this point in a tuba D Vinci video you’re probably wondering okay that sounds great but what are some of the trade-offs
There’s got to be something wrong with roundabouts if we don’t use them right they seem too good to be true well actually they are very popular just not here in the US one of my favorite things in
All the world is traveling and I’ve been doing a fair bit lately I was in Spain recently one of the countries with the most roundabouts I’ve ever seen and even India where they’re not as common as Spain but pretty prevalent today there are only roughly 8,800 roundabouts in the
Entire us but in the UK there are three times as many over 25,000 and France has close to 50,000 roundabouts even though both countries are tiny compared to the US fun fact in the UK they even have a roundabout appreciation society that tubs its president the Lord of the Rings and publishes
A calendar with the best roundabouts of the year yeah we do things a little bit differently here in the US so what’s going on why aren’t we doing more of this in the US is there a big traffic
Light Lobby that’s trying to hold us all down to be honest that’s a tricky one but remember Carmel Indiana that we talked about before Jim Brainard was elected mayor of Carmel and after learning about roundabouts he became obsessed with them he started a crusade to replace all
Traffic light intersections with roundabouts today Carmel has 144 roundabouts and only 15 traffic light intersections in the entire city it has more roundabouts than any other city in the US since they built roundabouts to improve Traffic Safety they did their homework and tackled
All the relevant metrics and here’s what they found roundabouts didn’t reduce the net number of crashes but it made them less dangerous after replacing traffic lights with roundabouts only one crash in a thousand resulted in death in standard four-way intersections that number used to be four
Times Higher and in y intersections used to be nine debts per every 1,000 crashes today the average number of debts and intersections per 100,000 people per year in Carmel is just two remember the US average is currently 12.9 over six times higher so roundabouts reduced fatality
Rates by over sixfold at least from that one data point in Carmel Indiana now this is not something you normally do in engineering but just for fun imagine if we took what happened in Carmel and just EXP expanded that to the entire us for a minute that would mean replacing 272,000
Intersections now I know that’s a lot but bear with me if we extrapolate the difference between 10.9 deaths per 100,000 per population per year to the entire country we could save over 360,000 lives every single year that’s almost four times the population of Carmel Indiana I mean you got
To think about it what is a life worth and what is 360,000 lives worth okay so now for the cons roundabouts aren’t perfect solutions for intersections they do pose some other particular challenges as I mentioned a moment ago roundabouts do lead to more non-fatal crashes that lead to
Property damage driving on a curve is harder than a straight line so it’s more likely for inexperienced drivers to hit the central island or run into the car in front of them as they’re not really sure where they should be looking but like we mentioned even though there might be a
Crash there’s less death they’re not as expensive as building a traditional signalized intersection with all the post light control boxes wiring and maintenance however replacing an existing intersection with a roundabout can cost close to $2 million depending on where it’s done it
Could potentially pay for itself in the long run but it would set a city back quite significantly finally they also take up more space than a traditional intersection so you can’t exactly retrofit one in a small City with narrow streets that’s probably why they had to leave 15 traffic
Lights in Carmel but for every con there are even more benefits to roundabouts it seems counterintuitive but roundabouts make for smoother uninterrupted traffic you don’t have to wait needlessly idling your car at of red light even though no one’s coming how infuriating is
That that’s really where people start to get antsy and do the wrong things that get them into trouble this doesn’t just let you go to work and back home faster but also saves fuel potentially and lowers
Carbon emissions in Carmel the 144 roundabouts are estimated to save drivers $2 to3 million a year in fuel since there are roughly 100,000 people there that translates to a savings of about $100 per family per year assuming one car per family not a lot but it’s still just an unintended benefit and
While there’s no technical reason why roundabouts can’t just spring forth everywhere here in the US there are some public perception issues to address Americans are just generally unfamiliar or uncomfortable with roundabouts they don’t encounter them very often and it is a very odd
Experience until you get used to it and in that same vein change is just hard for people right if you’re the mayor of a town that converts all your cities to roundabouts like the guy in Carmel do
You really want to be on the hook if something bad happens or there’s some rise in in some kind of a rate most people don’t either there’s just a sense of change is bad let’s just keep doing things the
Oldfashioned way and there’s also somewhat of a conundrum for self-driving cars since they have more trouble negotiating a roundabout than they would a traditional traffic light intersection and if we’re headed that way anyway maybe we just wait because self-driving cars will negotiate with
Each other and have much more safety regulations in place and maybe this is a non-factor but what do you think do you have roundabouts where you live would you be in favor of seeing them one other really amazing side benefit is that when you have cities built around roundabouts you have
Beautiful city squares like for example in Spain it was a Christopher Columbus statue or other beautiful parks and places to sit the roundabout becomes a iconic City landscape feature instead of a hideous traffic Abomination there’s so much about them that I love and after traveling as
Much as I have I kind of like them will they work here in the US is another question entirely but one thing is for sure traffic lights sometimes can do the opposite of what they intend and they are pretty dangerous so be careful at traffic signal intersections and don’t forget to let
Us know what you think and where you fall on the great roundabout debate all right until next week check out this video next I think you’re going to like it I’m R TR D Vinci we’ll catch you next week
Traffic Lights: PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://PDSDebt.com/twobitdavinci
As an engineer I love digging into unintended consequences, or things in our lives that we always thought were there to make us safer, but sometimes have the opposite effect. The classic example is the age old traffic light, which was a brilliant idea to minimize traffic and bring safety to intersections. But there’s a huge problem and this one was really interesting, and I think there’s probably a better way to do this. Let’s talk about road safety, and intersections, one of the most dangerous parts of our modern lives.
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Chapters
0:00 – Introduction
1:00 – Findings
4:50 – Real World Data
5:40 – Why Are they Dangerous?
7:50 – New Designs
9:00 – The Roundabout
10:40 – Why Don’t we Use them?
13:25 – Negatives
15:20 – Public Perception
what we’ll cover
two bit da vinci,traffic light,traffic safety,driving safety,roundabouts vs.,roundabouts vs traffic lights,roundabouts vs intersections,americans vs roundabouts,How Traffic Lights Actually Kill More People,green light traffic safety,road safety traffic light,are roundabouts better,are roundabouts safer,are traffic intersections safe,why is speeding dangerous,how to make a better intersection, How Traffic Lights Are Killing People – Is There a Better Way?, The TRUTH About Traffic Lights – This Will Surprise You
36件のコメント
Thanks for Watching! PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://PDSDebt.com/twobitdavinci
You're confusing correlation with causality. Traffic lights do not cause accidents, bad drivers do. To your point that traffic bogs down at lights during a power outage or other failure, traffic always goes slower at a roundabout.
America would find some way to mess this up we always do 😿
I wouldn't blame the traffic lights so much as the smooth brains driving the cars that don't follow the signals 😹
You missed one very crucial reason why traffic lights are dangerous. They remove the sense of responsibility from the driver. Look at the time most people will take to start when the light goes green. It's rarely less than 2 seconds. And yes, it's a long time. It's not that important out of being a hint. If you remove all sense of responsibility, you lower attention.
How this could be fixed? Yeah, first roundabouts everywhere. They are so much safer it's mad they aren't everywhere still. They even cost less maintenance money. The only downsides I see is they take a bit more space and when they are not very easy to navigate when covered with snow, but there is virtually none where I live. They were invented more than a century ago. But much easier, turn a red light into a stop. It won't have much of an impact in heavy traffic but what will then happen? People will look, they will stay engaged with their drive while waiting.
It's the very same with speed limits. Now, you would likely kill your channel if you did speak about it, but speed limits turns people into much worse drivers for the very same reason. Actual speed related accident are relatively rare. On top of that, most of those you would relate to speed are likely to be actually about drug use. Don't tell people they are less capable of estimating their speed than a painted, fixed sign that was likely decided out of some regulation about the shape and features of a road. The real speedsters don't care about these limits, while the average Joe will kill some of their attention looking at their speedometer. And they will be afraid of speeding (fear of citations and death), limiting their attention. And they have less power on their speed, meaning less sense of responsibility and lowering their attention, competence and confidence.
One point of contention. You suggested that traffic lights are put up for dangerous intersections, and that may be why they tend to be more dangerous. You are close there, but I think you missed the mark. Traffic lights are put up at intersections that experience higher volume, and that specifically is what makes an intersection with a traffic light more dangerous than an intersection without. The more cars you have traveling through an intersecting path, the higher number of cases you will have where those intersecting vehicles collide. As for roundabouts, They have embraced them in my community in Ontario, Canada, and I love them! I think the only reason they haven't been adopted more widely is that infrastructure planners in the US aren't very aware of them and how useful and efficient they are. That culture is spreading here in Canada, and I expect the same to happen in the US.
There's one teeny tiny problem with roundabouts in the US: Americans don't play nice with each other.
Brit here – roundabouts are great. Several near my house and it would take forever if everyone had to wait and go once at a time. Flow is great. Y'all mad over the pond!
If there is 43k traffic related deaths per year in the USA, how can you save 360k people a year by introducing the roundabouts? Author probably made a mistake and moved the decimal point, and turned 36k to 360k.
The big question is WHY don't American traffic lights have countdown timers?
BS analysis. Intersections with no traffic lights have mu h less traffic. You need to normalize the data based on number of cars using an intersection per hour.
There is another down-side to roundabouts, that if the flow of traffic is not roughly equal on each of the enterances, the one with the heaviest flow tends to block the others. Often roundabouts also have traffic lights to relieve this problem – but then you get the same hold-ups you would get from just lights.
For small intersections, we (in the UK & Europe) have 'mini roundabouts' where the island in the middle is as small as a couple of feet in diameter – so they could be retrofitted to most intersections.
In Massachusetts there are tons of roundabouts—surely that total is missing a few… Great video!
I'm from Oklahoma where I had only seen 1 round-a-bout in OKC before coming to Bulgaria, I find round-a-bouts annoying but I do prefer them to traffic lights because here in Bulgaria where I'm currently at they do have them and they make getting around busy parts of town easier.
360,000 lives per year? That doesn't make since – there are only 43,000 total fatalities – I think you need to revisit your work
You want to normalize the data for intersections, but doesn't the data for per capita deaths by country also deserve that same nuance/scrutiny?
I love roundabouts, assuming they are properly implemented, and appropriate to the location. Some of the roundabouts here in and around Tucson, Arizona are abominations. There are literally intersections that are both 4 way stops AND roundabouts. There are a lot of them. Many have completely unnecessary signage (like a 15 mph speed limit in a roundabout that is almost physically impossible to exceed), or to make it "simple" for drivers unfamiliar with roundabouts they throw in medians to separate right turn only lanes from lanes going into the roundabout to go straight or turn left. Then there are also intersections that just aren't going to be well suited to roundabouts.
For the most part, people just need to stop overthinking roundabouts. If you can turn right from a stop sign, you can negotiate a roundabout. When you realize that it's a yield, not a stop sign, even better. If that's too complicated for you, stop driving. You are a danger to everyone.
You forgot to normalize for number of cars that go through a intersection per day. If each of the 300,000 signaled intersection have 10 times the traffic of each unsignaled, then there you are more likely to die in an unsignaled intersection.
Ho do you save 360,000 lives a when there is only 42,000 auto accident deaths. You also mentioned that only 10,000 deaths happened at intersections of that 3000 at signaled intersections. So converting all signaled intersections to roundabouts would save 3 out 4 deaths of 3000, or save 2250 deaths.
This ignores one very important metric. The frequency of use of these intersections. Traffic lights are put up in dense population areas. Other intersections are in low density areas. These improved intersections could still be made with lights and would still be safer. The lights aren't the reason for the incidents the intersection design is
Right off the bat, you loss a ton of credibility here. Fatalities from terrorism on US soil, death from lightning specifically (vs any other inclement weather) and shark attacks are all very low percentages
I feel like a slept on aspect of roundabouts is that they don't need to be a single intersection. You can get a lot of the benefits from them while zooming them out to being the size of a whole block. Lots of places do this to some degree with having 1 way grids.
Maybe speed bumps near intersections…or make all lights flesh red.
Yes roundabouts are the best all rounder. Meanwhile please look into studies around speedbumps as well. In my area, any issue with traffic, bam! Slap a speedbump on the road. That's the only solution they can think about
Hmm, the roundabout on Arc de Triomphe is an utter disaster and I'm sure there are other examples. BTW, did anyone check the spelling on the text used in this video? I noticed several mistakes, one of them being "cares" instead of "cars".
In western Canada our municipalities are removing traffic lights and installing roundabouts and finding that traffic flows smoother and with far less injuries and fatalities. Traffic actually flows faster even though individual cars have to slow down. Remember the old saying from a movie "slower is smoother, smoother is faster." There is a strange idiosyncrasy among the citizens of the U.S. in that they're particularly reluctant to change even when that change will reap untold benefits. Changing to roundabouts is one example. changing to the metric system is another.
We have dozens of new round-abouts in the Dallas Fort Worth Area. Saves about $1Million in just not having signal lights per intersection. I love Round-Abouts.
I HATE roundabouts! In MANY of you scenes you showed of roundabouts, you can see LOTS of traffic queued up. I remember one in Virginia where the wait was so bad, they took out the round about and put in a stoplight intersection instead. The other thing is that sometimes you get into a situation, which you mentioned, where the driver doesn't know where to look. When one approaches a roundabout, one CANNOT be watching the roundabout traffic until the car ahead of one has cleared and has entered the roundabout. Doing anything else might cause a rear-end collision. Finally, MOST roundabouts are WAY too small in the US. I've seen many drivers who go INTO the roundabout the wrong way when making a left turn, thus only going one-quarter of the way, IN THE WRONG DIRECTION, instead of the proper three-quarters of the way around they are supposed to take. I think you are minimizing how obnoxious roundabouts are when not done right. And even when they are large enough to handle the traffic, the traffic gets clogged from one or two of the direction like the example I mentioned from Virginia. We have a VERY long development cycle before we get it right here in the U.S.
In Mexico we have a lot of roundabouts, they a quite challenging did they have more than two lanes.
Another problem with round about is GPS gets confused. You can loose your way in round about.
This topic is irrelevant. Let's focus on getting fully autonomous cars on the roads and ban people from driving themselves. Make cars talk and negotiate the best flow in real time from a distance.
Around abouts are really fun in my 72 foot semi truck. Automobile traffic really doesn't know what to do when I take up both lanes
Unsignaled intersections are in less traveled than signaled. By far. The need for signals increases as the amount of traffic increases. This is also for the flow of traffic.
Nitpicking and not super relevant but this was driving me nuts as a former Hoosier. In Indiana it’s pronounced CAR-mul not car-MEL like the (admittedly lovely) town in California
Looks like traffic deaths jumped up quite a bit in 2021, I wonder if anything novel was happening that year?
If self driving cars can’t deal with roundabouts properly the way we would, then it’s not a fully developed self driving car… There will always be a higher damage risk at traffic lights and that won’t change with self driving because we have yet to see the technology mature beyond not making basic errors we have to correct, so we are a long way from the necessity of it being at least 10x safer than a good human driver… not to say it can’t ever happen, but I’m not convinced we’re as close as some would have us think we are, it’s going to be a long time before we can actually take our eyes off the road with confidence unless they try to do crazy shit like suddenly forcing everyone to use it because that would supposedly make everyone safer…. 🤦♂️
I first got familiar with the roundabouts in the UK and definitely like them. Where I live now in the Pacific Northwest we are getting more and more, and people seem to adjust and learn. Two thumbs up.
What do you think of the Michigan left? I've seen roundabout with stop signs in Chicago and I just ignore the stop signs