On 16 July, 11:39, wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:23:13 +0100

"Basil Jet" wrote:
red before this decision is made. Surely this must be a mistake rather than
design.

Don't bet on it. perhaps it wasn't intentional to start with but when it was
realised it would slow traffic down they probably decided not to fix it.
The lights on the purley way in croydon still go red to let imaginary cars out
of empty shop car parks and industrial estates at 1am. Don't tell me thats
not done on purpose just to slow down traffic who might be trying to get a
move on on an empty dual carraigeway. You're not allowed to get anywhere
quickly in london.

How are the phases of traffic lights controlled anyway? Is there a program
inside them written in some standard programming language, and someone has

They probably used to run off an 4 or 8 bit microcontroller with the program
written in assembler, but these days it seems that you can't be a self
respecting embedded systems designer without specifying that the hardware must
be a PC running Windoze because the only thing you can code in is VB.

B2003

I should report it to TFL for London. I had a similar problem at a
junction a couple of years ago. it turned out the sensor for
detecting cars was broken so between 2200 and 0600 it would not let
any cars out of the side road. Had to pass through a red light
(carefully) with the permission of the police car who was waiting
behind me.