Smart Stoplights

There are three stoplights on my way to and from work each day. Considering I mostly use a bike path and and am only on the road for less than two miles, that seems to be a bit much. All of the lights are considered "smart lights" in that they have sensors in the pavement to detect when a car is present. Only one of the three can be triggered by a bicycle and so I have to hit the pedestrian button on the other two.

For some reason, a lot of people think that smart lights are triggered by the weight of the car. That isn't true. Instead there is a metal detector built into street. When you car passes over the detector (basically a piece of wire wound around a toilet paper tube), a signal is sent to the smart light's computer. In California, the system actually works and lights change accordingly. In Utah, they have some sort of algorithm that was written by some idiot that never got full credit for homework assignments in college. There is a bit of a delay that can be as long as a minute. This is meant to keep traffic flowing in high-congestion area. Unfortunately it seems like a huge waste of my time at 11:30 at night when I am coming home from the airport.

I would like to propose a new for of smart light. Instead of using a metal detector embedded in the street, why don't we use the camera mounted on top of the stoplight? After all, we have facial recognition software that does a pretty good job. Shouldn't we also be able to create automobile and bicycle recognition software? One of the problems with the metal detector method is that you have to be right over the sensor. Using a camera, you could see the cars approaching and determine that you want to keep traffic flowing as opposed to instantly switching lights. In the case where there are no cars coming because it is 11:30 at night, light changes would be much quicker.

Hopefully someone is thinking about this. After all, most stoplights already have cameras on them to monitor traffic flow and accidents. I'll bet we can even improve everyone's gas mileage as we will spend less time idling and more time at speed. Most importantly, I won't have to get off my bike to hit the pedestrian button to cross the street.