RLJ

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
For the avoidance of doubt I was riding my Brompton, I didn’t RLJ.
So everyone on a bike didn't RLJ. Please don't exaggerate.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
Can we talk about the elephant in the room? UK traffic lights are crap and encourage and reward RLJing.

Our traffic lights prioritise motor traffic to an insane extent, still following rules (called an advisory leaflet, but treated as hard rules by almost every signals engineer) from the 1980s (I think) which set minimum timings for motorists to cross or wait and limit how much lights can react to demands. Traffic light programming is kept simple and stupid because it's the easiest way to prove that the advice has been followed, which is used as a defence if the signals don't work for some user group, or sometimes any users. There's loads of lights where logically nobody can turn across the cycleway because the adjacent parallel carriageway has a green light, but the cycleway gets a red to give people walking on the cycleway the rules-dictated time to clear the crossing. We have countdown timers only for pedestrian and pedestrian+cycle green lights (not for the red lights like in other countries) to make people run across the road and not prolong the red for drivers, no confirmation of detection of cycles at sensor-activated lights and no backup beg button at non-pedestrian lights. We don't have cyclists-give-way-left-turn-on-reds like France and Belgium (and maybe others by now), and government is now gradually replacing advisory toucan red lights with split parallel pedestrian+cycle red lights where the red is compulsory for cyclists (but bizarrely there's no law yet against cycling past the pedestrian red man, but I doubt that will last long once it becomes widely known). In the UK, if a cyclist waits for all the red lights, they will be stood like a lemon giving way to nothing for minutes every trip, far more than a motorist doing a similar trip, while RLJing cyclists will rarely be in danger and get there minutes earlier. Our shoot traffic lights incentivise and reward RLJing. It's unrealistic to expect the majority to ignore that because of a tiny risk of an occasional fine. Our traffic light rules should be reformed if we want to reduce RLJs.

Here's how it could/should be:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knbVWXzL4-4
 
Last edited:

PK99

Legendary Member
Location
SW19
Motorists regularly jump red lights here in Birmingham. They're far more dangerous than cyclists and e-scooters.

The problem is that once the front car is stopped, no other car can pass, but some cyclists are happy to ride past on either side of said car and through the red light.
 
Just come back from a night out in Manchester - Oxford road area

not much in the way of RLJ spotted

but a lot fo the time the cars totally ignored the advanced stop lines at traffic lights - even if there was already a bike stopped waiting there!
 

postman

Squire
Location
,Leeds
Walworth Road & East Street saw a 38% of drivers distracted by phones or other activities while at the traffic lights.

Someone drop CyclingMikey a line.38% he won't have enough battery time.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
not much in the way of RLJ spotted

but a lot fo the time the cars totally ignored the advanced stop lines at traffic lights - even if there was already a bike stopped waiting there!
A motorist in a bike box is almost always an RLJ, but they have to get video to prove the light didn't change between the stop lines, so it's very rarely punished.
 
OP
OP
presta

presta

Guru
Here's how it could/should be:

You could make a big improvement just by reprogramming existing lights without the expense of new hardware.

Keep the existing light sequence for safety critical junctions, but at others where safety permits use this sequence:

Flashing red: Give way
v
Red & amber: green's next
v
Green & amber: You have priority, but the junction is a give way
v
Amber: red's next
v
Flashing red

Now you avoid forcing people to stop when there's nothing to stop for, as it is with an ordinary give way sign, but without the junction-hogging problems of give way lines that traffic lights were originally introduced to avoid.
 
Top Bottom