TRANSPORT IMPACTS

In Sydney, as in most cities of the world, the lit up green man is the signal for people to walk across a road.  When there is a red man lit up you are meant to wait.  There is often a button next to the lights which you need to press in order to call the green man into action.  The red man comes without being called.  There is a problem with the green men of Sydney… they have been programmed to be extremely skimpy and I’m going to tell you a story about how this has come about and how it could be fixed.

A traffic light is a sequence of movements – a bit like a circle of dancers where some get to move at some times and must stay still at others.  There are lots of traffic lights happening in a city so it is like one big ballroom, with people moving from one dance circle to the next.  Some of these people move by putting their foot on an accelerator, others all together in a bus, then there are those rotating pedals around in circles while others move lightly on their feet.

Those moving lightly on their feet are the one’s that must wait for the green man before entering the dance circle.  However, the rights of the accelerator pushing dancers have been making sure that most of the dancing time belongs to them.  Their time in the circle has been maximised and synchronised with other dance circles so they can be dancing as much as possible.  Meanwhile those moving lightly on their feet have had little representation in the choreography department, as for each round of the dance (cycle of traffic lights) they are just given enough time to dance from one side of the circle to the other and little more than.  This is also contingent on whether one manages to press a button on time which allows them to do this short little dance.

I propose that we reconfigure these dance circles, so that pedestrian get the maximum time allowable. So this is what I think…..

• Why walk once when you can walk twice in a cycle? – Ensure that the green man comes on every phase within a cycle that it can 
• Keep it green – keep the signal on the green man as long as possible within the phase – not just the time it takes to walk across the road (you don’t keep the lights for motor traffic only green for the time it takes cars to cross the intersection
• Don’t make us press the button – when the green man can come on automatically with no conflict to cars – there is no need for a button – JUST MAKE IT AUTOMATICALLY GREEN!
• Think about shortening the cycles… if anyone from the RTA wants to justify the way the signals are at the moment, I’d be happy to chat

So I guess that’s all I ask.  Let’s see who has the last dance