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