There is a Traffic Engineering Term for this.... (Score 1)

It is called a "dilemma zone". As it has been pointed out before, it is possible for the yellow light to be too short for you to safely stop before you reach the intersection. This is not a good Traffic Engineering Practice, and endangers the public.

I forget the exact equation, but timing a yellow light goes something like this: 0.5 seconds + the time it takes the design vehicle to cover the distance it takes to stop. If the yellow light is shorter than this, then it would be nearly physically impossible for you to stop before you reached the intersection.

If you get one of these tickets, I think getting it dismissed would be a simple matter of getting the light timing for the signal (the jurisdiction controlling the light should have this on file), and then have a registered traffic engineer do the yellow light length calculations, and hopefully the judge would have enough brains to throw the ticket out, and put the city on notice that the practice is dangerous.