Why not?

Because the FCC hasn't been completely bought by the industry... yet.

Damn. Wish there was a once year mod point for +6.

The same argument could be made about cash (could be involved in something nefarious and untraceable)

Go read about "civil forfeiture" and be very, very upset.

The judge made the assumption that anyone who wants to be untraceable to law enforcement must be a criminal, which is actually not such a huge stretch.

"Not a huge stretch" ...for a totalitarian, sure. But that sort of thing was supposed to have been off Austria's agenda since 1945.

Because now Google is censoring people's emails without a court order if the entity demanding the censorship is rich and powerful enough!

Many cities have been adjusting the timing of signals to be lower than standard lengths required by national standards to increase ticket revenue.

They could also be doing it to try to squeeze a little better level of service out of their capacity analysis so they don't have to spend money widening (maybe that extra couple of seconds per phase is the difference between a "D" and an "E"), or because they're ignorant of the national standards and don't realize they're being stupid.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to answer the "malice or stupidity?" question by saying that malice isn't a possibility. I'm just saying that among traffic engineers -- especially ones employed by jurisdictions -- there's plenty of stupidity to go around.

If you did that, then some stupid pedestrian would walk too close to the road, not see the signal change, get hit by a car and sue. Then the blinder would be removed again.

Or, even if that wouldn't actually happen, the excessively-risk-averse legal department (either at the signal manufacturer, or at the jurisdiction controlling the intersection) would still use such an argument to nix the idea before it would ever get installed.

We're not talking about cars sitting at the stop bar, we're talking about cars who have a green light who are approaching the intersection. The difference in angle between a pedestrian on the sidewalk and a car in the lane 15 feet to the side and 300 feet back up the road is only about 3 degrees.

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|<-15 ft->| [car]

there is no excuse for hitting a pedestrian in a cross walk or for a car to hit car at a cross walk

Of course there is! If the car has the right of way and is coming through the intersection at speed, but a pedestrian steps into the crosswalk against a "don't walk" signal when the car is too close to stop, then the resulting collision is the [now ex-]pedestrian's fault.

You can enter the intersection on yellow, and (legally speaking) it doesn't count as running the red even if it turns red while you're still in it. The point of the yellow light, however, is that you "shouldn't" enter on yellow unless it's physically impossible for you to stop. (But "shouldn't" is unenforceable.)

What they were thinking is that the phase needed to be longer to let all the vehicles through.

In other words, the minimum length of the green phase is determined by two factors: the time it takes for a pedestrian to cross (starting as soon as the light turns green) (X seconds), and the time it takes for the maximum design-capacity number of cars to cross (Y seconds). If Y > X, the light stays green after the pedestrian countdown ends.

And what if they don't? You're gonna deck them?

The problem is not drivers looking at the pedestrian signal for the crosswalk perpendicular to the, the problem is drivers looking at the signal for the crosswalk parallel to them. If I'm a driver with a green light, and I can see that the ped countdown timer for the same direction currently reads "7," then I know I have 7 seconds to get to the light before it turns yellow.

In contrast, looking at perpendicular pedestrian countdowns is useful when you're at a red light and wanting to know when it will turn green, although that's less reliable because you also have to know whether there will be any left turn phases.

(This assumes the limiting factor on the phase length is pedestrian crossing time, which is often the case.)

And the worst part is when there's a "courteous" dumbass with a gap behind him and then a platoon of cars behind that. If he just went immediately then I could pull out behind him. But because he tried to wait on me instead of just getting out of the way (but then eventually went when he realized that I refused to go out-of-turn), the gap behind him closed and now I have to wait for the whole damn platoon. Thanks, dumbass!