How often do you hear the minarchist say, “Well, I don’t like government, but we at least need things like traffic laws. We need a government to keep us safe”? What if we actually began to publicly advocate the abolition of traffic regulations? FULL ARTICLE by Justin T.P. Quinn
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/14159/the-praxeology-and-ethics-of-traffic-lights/
The Praxeology and Ethics of Traffic Lights
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what are the pre requisites for having a traffic light free system? the drivers already have to be courteous,traffic light to avg ?
could you theorise why it doesnt work in countries like india?.where lights exist,but nobody gives a damn about it.and its always the guy with the biggest car who wins.most people in india would do anything to have lights that work
I must respectfully disagree. I lived in Guatemala for several years and the way they drive is completely different to ours. Instead of lights at every intersection, every driver just slows down and will occasionally honk. This gives them time to react to someone else already in the process of crossing the intersection and it alerts both drivers and pedestrians to his/her presence. It’s almost comical how much simpler, and more effective, a third world country’s traffic can be compared to our own. Although these ideas seem ridiculous at first, they have already been proven to work. What are we waiting for?
I agree. I’ve spent some time in the Dominican Republic. There really are no laws other than the larger vehicle has the right of way (naturally). It took me a couple of days to recondition myself, but after that, it was pretty enjoyable and not to mention safer.
I have to agree with Pravin.
This is an EXTREMELY bold assertion to say that ALL traffic rules should be abolished. It is one thing to argue that the way the government enforces them is idiotic and private enterprise would do an infinitely better job.
But to claim that all controls (outside of wishing to prevent an accident) are inherently bad seems to me to be overstretching it quite a bit.
this strikes me as the sort of thing which praxeology in of itself cannot answer and would actually need empirical analysis to back up.
I admit it is not out of the realm of possibility but it seems there is not near enough actual data to say this is likely true.
You’re correct but because it concerns the provision of a service. That is why it is not really a praxeological question but more so an entrepreneurial one.
I agree with pravin. While it would be interesting to see more privatized roads in action that don’t make use or make use less of traffic signals, anyone who’s seen videos of driving in a city in India or China knows that they don’t really follow the traffic laws anyway. I just watched Deadliest Roads on the History Channel and it is just nuts! People will pass each other on blind turns and not yield to oncoming traffic (poor Alex). That’s why this statement…
“Both cooperation and empathy are not only part of human nature but are things that must exist within any rational being.”
…doesn’t necessarily work. Perhaps for some of us, it would be fine. However, if people are not being rational, then the argument falls apart.
Invoking China and India, who have government designed roads, isn’t really a good example. Much of the debate is that government designed roads aren’t designed around the customer (drivers), but around simplicity and ease. For example, most private roads before the government came in and took over the entire industry in the USA followed the contours of the land and avoided most of those blind curves. Government roads blast out sides of mountains and create unnatural turns that create those problems. You know the road wasn’t privately built when the curves and straights have speed limits posted of 60 to 30 and back to 60 in a 200 meter area.
Oh I agree, I would believe that a private road builder would be one that would make more efficient use of the land and would be able to design a road that would make much less use off traffic signals. However, even if we did privatize the system overnight, those roads are still going to be there and I don’t know how taking out lights would be helpful. At one intersection near me, we used to have a blinking red/yellow signal and it was always dangerous to cross because people would fly down the hill. It became a lot safer once a light was put in.
In the world of privatized roadways, you would likely get a mixture of both – some roads with some sort of traffic regulation mechanisms, and many with nothing. Spontaneous order could take care of things on a lot of roads.
I agree that this may not be the best use of praxeology in this article. The author seems to make a lot of broad statements, and does not treat each case individually. However, I thought this was a good article.
The traffic problems in India and China are more likely the results of roadways that are undersized for both the traffic volume and the physical dimensions of the vehicles using them than a lack of regulation. I’m also going to assume you’ve got parking on these roads plus business fronting on them as well which also screams for space. You see this even in Europe where very old roads inside of villages or on mountainsides get clogged up even if one car stops or pulls off to the side.
The tyranny and danger of the traffic light has given rise to a couple of other phenomenon. First is the infamous “red light camera” which takes advantage of the human behavior outlined above in order to enrich the state – under the excuse of increasing safety. We’re also seeing laws mandating drivers to stop – not just yield – to pedestrians in cross walks even if the driver has the green and traditionally the right of way causing all new problems.
I have to agree with Pravin too. I live in india. Everyday on the way back home, I need to take a U-turn at a traffic signal on a 6-lane toll-road to get to the lane that takes me to my house. Even though I wait (religiously) for the signal for my U-turn, no one, not even the smallest of vehicles (and there are dozens of buses too) bothers to even slow down, leave alone stop, to allow me to take a U-turn even though they can see the red light bright and clear on their lane.
I keep feeling that my countrymen are still (largely) animals at heart and it shows in their behaviour on roads. Might is indeed right on Indian roads. I think you need a courteous populace before you can even speak of things like “traffic signal free roads”. Do it in India and all you will have is smash-ups and incidents of road-rage everywhere.
Or it may be the way courtesy is developed. There’s a saying that could work here, “In the land where everyone has a gun, courtesy is king.” People would be forced out of necessity to be courteous because no one would get anywhere otherwise.
You could add government imposed restrictions on gun ownership to the list of interventions leading to the mess in India. I was actually threatened by a hooligan once and was telling my wife “If only gun ownership weren’t restricted, that thug would probably not have been so bold”. Out here, gun ownership is not a freedom available. So only the criminally oriented have them.
Thanks for adding that to my understanding.
How do you decide whose property has been violated in the absence of traffic laws in the case of an accident? Who deserves compensation for damages in an accident?
To address Pravin’s assertion; the problem with roads in India is not that traffic laws are un-enforced but that India is attempting to model their system after the United States. I’m in a traffic engineering class right now where we are learning about the statistical methods used to determine signaling and placement of lights/signs/etc. The problem with all of these statistics, and their consequent equations and coefficients, is that they were gathered with only one system (the US) as a model. The United States’, as well as India’s monopoly of the roads has severely limited creative innovation. Hardly anything truly new is ever tried. If roads themselves were privatized then competitive forces would force change, and progress would surely improve the overly simplistic and wasteful procedures and designs that exist today.
Maybe no lights at all isn’t the answer, but who knows? You can’t know, because nobody can truly say without experiment fueled by profit incentives. What is known however is that markets are proven to provide innovation, and that traffic laws are in dire need of some innovation.
There’s a lot that goes into engineering a road or an intersection and the ones we have designed right now are in no way the most optimum designs for un-signalized intersections. You shouldn’t just turn of the lights everywhere and expect it to be perfect (even though it worked pretty well at that one location in the video). Instead, intersections should be re-engineered. If the goal was shifted from creating a turn based system to one that optimized peoples intuitive sense of right of way, then the intersections would look and operate a lot differently.
Actually, the problems run much deeper. There are particular classes of road users who are especially responsible for the mess. Firstly, there are government-owned public transport corporations whose drivers really drive like they own the road. They are, for all practical purposes, absolutely immune to legal action for violation of traffic rules. They can actually kill and get away with it. They even have the temerity to bump into vehicles because they were not given way (I am not throwing wild accusations. It happened to my wife on a rather wide road).
Secondly, there are the smaller forms of public transport such as 3-wheeled vehicles (we call them autorickshaws out here). Almost all these vehicles (at least where I live) are owned by policemen and operated by their proxies. This business is also highly regulated and it is not easy to get a permit to drive an autorickshaw. Even those who do are bullied into becoming members of auto-drivers’ unions and once there, they behave like hooligans.
Thirdly, there is the police establishment that it entrusted with the responsibility of enforcing traffic regulations. Corrupt to the core, they are the butt of many a joke in our movies. The end of every month is when we find cops of all hues on the roads trying to frame all and sundry on some offence or the other, just to extract some money from them (they run out of money, you see).
I could go on and on. The reasons are many, but our roads are indeed a horrible mess. I don’t know if removing the lights alone would solve the problems. It is very likely that the role of government intervention in creating this mess runs much deeper and that the solution could be a very complex affair.
When there is an intersection with stop signs on all 4 approaches, wouldn’t this in effect be an uncontrolled intersection. The rule is, first come first serve, but isn’t that the rule that would occur naturally.
I could see a lot more roads built like smaller versions of freeways, with more bridges, tunnels, and merging entrances. Private road builders would have an incentive to build better operating roads. Maybe they’d figure out something we can’t imagine today.
What I wonder about is a typical city with an intersection every block. Would we have to stop at every single intersection, or might some other method be used. Perhaps many intersections could go back to the circle, something I found often in other countries but less so in the US. I recall lots of circles in Washington D.C. when I worked in that town some 40 years ago.
Stop signs aren’t quite a good example. Think more of a business that has a driveway into his parking lot butted up against a busy road. Most of these operations don’t have any kind of sign or signal. How do you get out? Considering the main road is busy, you just wait until there’s an opening. Spontaneous order would work this way as the inevitably more busy route would take precidence over the lesser used streets at an intersection, so those on the more trafficked road will continue on through the intersection while those on the lesser trafficked road will wait for an opening.
This is the Peltzman effect going away. Without the signs, people will be more cautious about going into an intersection than they would with signals. Signals create a false sense of security so individuals believe they don’t have to pay attention to what they’re doing so long as they follow the signal.
I, for one do not see a conflict between minarchism and private roads…
Let a company that is running the road figure out the right amount of signals and signs that maximizes the customer utility. Though the rest of the discussion is interesting, it is on the topic of traffic engineering rather than economics.
Last week I needed to stop at a grocery store off of a “major” road, and the only way to get back on the road was lining up at a left-turn light on a “minor” road – that happened to dead end at the intersection, and the opposing side is a driveway to an industrial building.
There were already ~12 cars in line waiting to turn left ahead of me, but since this light had a designated “left turn arrow”, I didn’t think I was in for much of a wait. After a minute, the light turned and a few cars went through. After that, however, we sat through 2 entire light cycles without a left turn arrow. Some cars began turning left (safely) when the primary light was green (breaking the law) – because it was unknown why we were not getting a green. This was laboriously slow, though, as the light was short for the minor road, and there was traffic exiting the building across the intersection.
Being glad that the people in front of me were rationally ignoring the signals, I thought I would be going in another minute. Unfortunately there was a driver that refused to break the law and sat at the red light. One cycle goes by and we just sit there. During the next green light (going straight, the left turn lane still had red), people honked, trying to instigate some progress through the intersection. The car still sat there. The next cycle, people started driving around this “law-abider” and turning left through the red light. A couple of cars got through the intersection, but still the car sat – waiting for the god in the lamp-post to allow the driver to go.
I eventually got through the intersection, by passing the stationary car waiting for the signal, and turning left on a red light. It took nearly 10 minutes to exit the shopping center and get back on my way. The biggest impediments to me being able to get on with my day were the malfunctioning traffic signal, and the obedient driver that threw all reason and self interest out the window when a filtered light bulb representing the control of the (city) government told the driver to sit still.
And this happened on a segment of road that was supposed to have been “scientifically designed” over the past year using timing and triggers to ensure “smooth” rush hours. Because there is no profit/loss measure for the controller of this road, abject and total failure is not surprising.
It’s interesting that those talking about driving in India point out that there are traffic lights, but people ignore them! If anything, that would seem to strengthen the argument against lights. Sure, they say stronger enforcement, but how much would that cost, and wouldn’t it diminish law enforcement in other areas, like robberies and such?
Anyway, I’m not so much against lights as I am against government roads–as has already been mentioned, let private road owners with economic incentives determine the best and most effective road controls, as they would be much more responsive to road issues than local governments could ever hope to be.
In some towns traffic lights actually cause accidents. They are set up with automatic video cameras to catch drivers who run red lights. They are adjusted to maximize revenue. To do this, the time it takes for the light to turn from green to red is set very low. This catches people who people who go through on amber. However, as soon as the light goes red, it is green in the left or and right direction, and cars in the intersection are prone to be hit by car moving at high speed from the left or right side. Revenue collection trumps safety.
Don’t forget the argument that traffic lights, while creating traffic, also reduce fuel efficiency thereby increasing fuel consumption which has the effect of increasing the state’s coffers via fuel tax. There is no incentive for the state to make road travel efficient and every incentive for the averse. I swear that when state revenues are down, they tweak the computer controlled traffic signals to generate more revenue by making travel just slightly less efficient. It’s an invisible iron fist.
Anarcho-capitalism does not mean roads with no rules, anyway. Each road-owner will provide a road suitable to their customers’ needs. THere will not be a one-size-fits-all “no rules” or “all rules” road but ones following differing configurations of rules as the road owner determines it to be most profitable. The article is valuable in highlighting a case where barely any formal rules were needed but it isn’t to imply this is synonymous with anarcho-capitalist road provision.
I thought the whole purpose of private roads was that there’d be no rules and everyone would figure things out themselves as apparently works in the Third World.
Ha-ha. Why do you continually misrepresent libertarian values? To mislead or trip up newbies? As Inquisitor implies, the purpose of private roads is to put roads “on the market” and thus subject to economic incentives, ensuring that roads are put to their best and most efficient uses for resources. This includes safety, among other things, as traffic jams and accidents certainly impede efficient travel of people and goods.
Can you clarify other terms? I’m getting confused by all the subtypes of anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, and minarchism.
What I haven’t seen mentioned is the true rational for traffic laws, motor-vehicle-registration laws, and drivers-license laws, all of which are judicially administered by traffic courts. Their primary purpose from the standpoint of the State that administers and enforces them is to demonstrate the control its agents can and do exert over their subjects. The freedom of people to travel without the state’s permission (i.e., driver’s license) and free from its intervention (authority to stop with or without cause) is exceedingly dangerous from the almighty State’s point of view. The State can never know what people are up to, and they might be up to all sorts of evil purposes if they think they won’t be stopped and asked what they are up to. They might even be conspiring with folks from other areas to abolish the State, and there must be none of that sort of stuff. If you have to ask the state for permission to travel by the most convenient means available, you ain’t free brother, and don’t pretend you are. Pull over, buddy!
Of course the secondary purpose of all those laws and regulations is $$$$$$. Money for the cities, states, cops, clerks, judges, insurance companies, etc., etc., etc. It’s a big industry, employing lots of State shills. How else you gonna feed ‘em.
I didn’t think control of drivers’ licenses was bad until the State used it to throttle men who couldn’t keep up with child support!
How do you decide whose property has been violated in the absence of traffic laws in the case of an accident? Who deserves compensation for damages in an accident?
AFAICT, this question can be properly answered only in the case of private roads. Trying to answer it in the case of public roads makes it very messy.
It seems very simple…run a stop sign, you pay for the damage caused in an accident. Turn left into the path of oncoming traffic, ignoring the legal right of way given to straight moving traffic, pay for the damage.
If there is no legally consistent and recognized right of way, you give quite a bit of arbitrary power to a third party mediator in the case of determining liability for an accident. Statutes regarding traffic limit the scope of liability that can be assigned to an individual by a judge or arbitrator.
It only becomes “messy” when insurance companies (or the drivers) dispute who the responsible party is in an accident. Use physical evidence in comparison to traffic law to determine liability.
The only equitable solution in case of conflicting traffic rules at privately owned and regulated intersections would be a no-fault claim. Insurance companies don’t like no-fault claims because they only account for the financial risk of the driver that they insure.
Why? What difference private owners make?
Only the rules set down by the owner of a property for use of the said property can be called legitimate. Accidents would then largely a product of violation of these legitimate rules. That would be a violation of the property rights of the owner of the private road, wouldn’t it?
Rules on usage of public roads are unenforceable except in the monopolistic judicial system of the State.
Who is the ultimate owner of any property? The one that has the balls and capacity to restrict it’s use. i.e. the “men with guns”.
You can argue all you want with a non-government extortionist or the government extortionist about legitimate property ownership, but like Tony Motana says in “Scarface”, “The only thing that gives orders is balls”. 
“Government is like a hammer, it can be used to build things or it can be used to destroy”. I don’t remember who said that, I read it on Steve Kangas’ Liberalism Resurgent website. It sucks, but that is stark reality. You defeat one beast, you have another to contend with.
private owners, by assigning liability to either driver, simultaneously runs the risk of assuming responsibility as well. no speed limit, can’t use speed to assign liabilty without being responsible for not setting a speed limit.
In fairness to minarchism (with which I disagree), I do not think that minarchists advocate government control of the roads. Most minarchists, as I understand it, believe that the sole function of the State should be to provide defence and arbitrartion services (i.e., the police, the military and the courts). Some people who want more government than this, such as government roads and traffic rules, might call themselves “minarchists” but I think this is stretching the term beyond its standard meaning.
Anyone doubting the effectiveness of private roads need only visit Shanghai or any major Chinese city. As stupid as that sounds on its face, China has virtually no traffic police. At all. Traffic is bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go, merge-at-will. Cars drive down the wrong side, and bikers have no respect at all for any arbitrary, forced sense of order. Yet it’s a much safer place to drive because people suffer no delusion that they can act like an idiot because everyone else is watching out for them. People in America and other heavy-enforcing nations feel they can text, change clothes, speed in crowded areas, and generally act stupid because they think cops are taking care of bad drivers. Want fewer accidents? Let everyone drive how they want.
I disagree. I slow down for ALL intersections, including green lights. There is no law that you are not allowed to exceed the minimum State mandated “safety” regulations.
Laws generally create a minimum standard designed for individuals that don’t regard the safety or rights of others. Otherwise, law enforcement is arbitrary with no limits placed on the officers whether they are privately or publically funded.
A minimum standard that could exist just as well without “laws” like people queueing without requiring “laws” to that effect. Common courtesy need not be made law. Also, he is totally correct that the idea that the government is “watching out” for you (when it isn’t, really) lulls people into a safe sense of security.
Traffic accidents won’t change, (more or less, safer or not, accidents WILL occur) just the way you are compensated for losses after an accident. How do you enforce the rules from differnet owners of different roads? Do you want to give the power to limit your movements and financial penalties for breaking rules to private enterprise as opposed to law enforcement, or allow private enterprise to utilize law enforcement to enforce an arbitrary system of rules and penalties determined by corporate interests rather than democratic process?
“I disagree. I slow down for ALL intersections, including green lights.”
Then you’re a safer driver than myself and the majority of the rest of the country.
Yes, Eric, I probably am.
A better way of putting it is that I consider my own safety and that of others ahead of convenience. I say convenience because I’m not exactly sure what is to be gained from “excessive speed”, for example.
Just to clarify, I am not trying to portray myself as a model for what a safe driver should be. With absolutely no judgment for anyone’s opinion, I simply value safety over freedom. The constant political battle is in striking a balance between safety and/or comfort, and freedom.
I am acutely aware that the safety offered by traffic regulation is dubious at best. A “False sense of security”. I disagree that traffic regulation creates a hazard. Driver action creates hazard. That’s why I constantly practice defensive driving habits, despite the State restrictions placed on other drivers and myself. I prefer this method over what is being done in other countries with total disregard for traffic rules. That doesn’t make me right or wrong and vice versa.
Traffic law gives me legal recourse against those that damage my property. If there is no speed limit, how can I argue that another drivers excessive speed caused an accident? If I’m rear-ended on a private road that has no speed limit, I could argue that his excessive speed caused the accident. He could just as easily argue that I was driving too slowly, causing the accident. The only way the owner of the road can nullify his responsibility for not having a speed limit is to deny fault to either driver. We would probably end-up with a highly regulated, albeit privatized, road system. Or we would trade a higher price for more freedom and or safety to drive as we wish.
Another point to consider is that the sole purpose of traffic law isn’t just accident avoidance. Cars are designed to provide survivability under certain, limited conditions, which loosely correlate to traffic law.
You don’t have a right to determine the risk that I am exposed to, whether I am right or wrong in my personal assessment of risk. I don’t have a right to determine the level of risk you should take, or to even dictate to you what constitutes unacceptable risk. To give absolute right to either party, necessarily infringes upon the absolute right of the other. That isn’t a solution, it’s cause for conflict.
Hey Justin. What I find interesting to analyze is the situation in which two persons are about to engage in an intersection, and only one can go first, obviously. Then, one of them must give way to the other. How is that explained by self-ownership? I think that a nice and fluent traffic is also a matter of culture, and being respectful, etc. Certainly, there’s no such thing today. Actually, you may be murdered for overtaking some people. That gives you an idea…
I’ve been to countries where traffic lights either existed and weren’t followed, or the state was too poor to have functioning ones. Lemme tell you, in a chaotic 3rd world urban area like, say, Manila… the chaos, traffic, fatalities, etc etc aren’t any less with or without lights. Nice that this experiment worked in a small obscure town though
This whole ludicrous idea is put to the lie every time there is a power outage in a section of my city. Everyone is forced to treat the affected intersections as first-come-first-served, and they all become massive, slow moving traffic jams. It seems to me that it’s always more efficient to let the smaller roads build up a few cars first and then let them all go at once.
I’d attribute the initial success in the small UK town to the phenomenon of novelty: everyone takes it seriously at first, because it’s new. As time goes on, however, the utility of the new rules will steadily decrease as people become accustomed to them and develop new bad habits. The same happened when we started putting in the rear-window mounted 3rd brake light (CHMSL) in cars: initially, they reduced rear-end collisions significantly, but as the novelty wore off and people got used to them, they stopped paying attention again and the collision rates slowly returned to near their original levels.
…And there’s always at least one asshole that disregards the way everyone else deals with intersections during a power outage.
I think the power outage example brings into question the idea that we have an “intuitive sense of right-of-way”…intersections without lights or signs are navigated exactly as we have learned to act at a four-way stop. That is conditioning, not intuition.
The “spontaneous order” referred to in the article is a reflection of self-organization as characterized by systems science. This process is a core requirement for a system to be able to create value which is known as its emergence. Self-organization evolves through ongoing feedback loops providing that a vertical hierarchy, the government/policy actions, affects principally only the system size, shape, and boundaries and not the ongoing exchanges of the people in the trenches, the horizontal hierarchy, that has the capacity to create the “spontaneous order.” (Traffic lights do suppress spontaneous order and almost totally migrate the alertness of the driver from optimizing the flow through the intersection to the dependence on the changing traffic light colors and presuming by default that others will do the same).
The argument that there is no need for government is being supported by an example of the emergence of spontaneous order within a traffic intersection: who enters first is allowed to proceed and so on. That is generally true, presuming a rational decision process among the drivers, but this example does not incorporate the fact that it was likely the government or some larger organization that built the roads and created the intersection. Someone else planned and constructed the roads, the intersection’s angles, the number of lanes, etc. The spontaneous order did emerge but it happened within the larger framework set up by someone else besides the travelers entering the intersection. Using this discussion point as well as the ones in the above paragraph, we can see that the spontaneous order emerged because people were free (no traffic lights) and able to organize themselves but this happened within the larger construct of an intersection. Both the vertical and the horizontal hierarchies are necessary but with the mandatory dual focus on system optimization, that is the ability for a system to create value and continue to evolve through adaptation.
There are numerous other important features that must be present for a system to be well functioning, be it our health care or cancer cell behavior in our bodily systems. For further clarification, please see references below:
Janecka IP: Is the U.S. Health Care an Appropriate System? A strategic perspective from
systems science. Health Research Policy and Systems 2009, 7:1
(Highly Accessed) http://www.health-policy-systems.com/content/7/1/1
Janecka IP: Cancer control through principles of systems science, complexity, and chaos theory: A model. Int J Med Sci 2007; 4:164-173. http://www.medsci.org/v04p0164.htm
Everywhere in the world you look, there is too much government. Once in a while, it is refreshing to see government step back for a bit and witness what Hayek called “…a spontaneous order” develop out of nowhere. The “invisible hand” continues to show itself everywhere it is tried.
I have lived in India for most part of my life. And I do agree with most of the comments. I also agree that there are unruly drivers and one needs a lot of guts to drive on indian roads.
But here is a video that shows that, given the constraints, people do tend to organize themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsPCsW3_aUY
(And those horns are, I believe,for safety and not necessarily depict rude behavior).
On a completely different note, I think that the traditional design of intersections is undesirable, and roads should never really intersect if possible! People who designed them in early ages wanted to mark the centre of the city where everything was located nearby, since more people walked. But it was probably followed even in modern times with all these big vehicles.
Is it only me, or has anyone else noticed how in places where there are lots of speed cameras, you spend half your time with one eye one the speedometer, leaving only one eye left for watching the road?
Yes, speed cameras make me look down not on the road!
Yes and no. In areas with far more lax traffic rules, traffic flows more smoothly in some instances, but overall collisions and pedestrian deaths are also higher, and the roads cannot handle as much traffic. Traffic is going to move much further and faster on a one-way road with synchronized lights than it is going to on a road without any demarcations or signalization whatsoever.
In addition to this, at least in America, police departments suddenly started to put cameras on lights to photograph people running through a red. The assumption at the start was that we had an epidemic of drivers running the red light. Did we? No. And as the tickets mounted, accidents increased (due to sudden stops on yellow), and someone got the word out that [i]all along[/i] the police had [i]timed[/i] the signal to make [/i]more drivers run through a red[/i]!!
After reading Walt and Dan’s comments, I want to add something. Shortening the yellow light not only increases the accidents you mentioned (side-swipes) but causes accidents for those who stop — getting rear-ended by drivers who expected them to continue through. So it increases the risk of accidents whether you continue on yellow or stop!
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