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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

- Drivers in Beijing advance into traffic-light controlled intersections even when the path ahead of them is blocked, causing a junction to get blocked up, even when all lanes leading away from it

This is the literal "gridlock" problem, which can lock up a road system. The US had that problem in some cities until New York City introduced "Don't Block the Box" around 1980. It took a PR campaign, and, some ticketing, and painting a big box with diagonal lines across some intersections, but eventually drivers got the idea to not enter the intersection until they had a way out of it. San Francisco is starting to have gridlock again, and a new "Don't Block the Box" campaign was started in 2014.

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And yet every now and then I'll be stopped waiting for a blocked intersection to clear before advancing, and the asshole behind me will start honking.

I live in the Seattle area though, not NYC.

interesting. I wonder how automated traffic cameras/redlight ticket systems would impact that? I suspect most people "squeeze" into the intersection to avoid the next cycle, because they dont see a traffic cop around. if all intersections are photo enforced, you'd think that problem would go away (or at least, citations would go up enough to fund some better traffic control/flow solutions)

It's more a training/PR problem than an enforcement problem. Painting intersections prone to gridlock with a diagonally hashed box helps more than ticketing. Here's the Ministry of the Interior of Quatar trying to get through to drivers on Twitter.[1]

"In this business there are very few problems that can't be solved with some yellow paint and a little bit of common sense." - Henry Barnes, NYC traffic commissioner.

[1] https://twitter.com/moi_qataren/status/643829644253261824

China (well, Beijing) has tons of photo enforced intersections, but the government itself doesn't see "blocking intersection" as wrong so they never ticket for that.

Also, I've never seen a traffic cop actually pull someone over or do enforcement at all (maybe some DUI checkpoints, that's it!). If it wasn't for the cameras, no laws would ever get enforced. They only enforce parking laws a couple of times a year, so many two lane roads have become one lane as citizens take advantage of a lack of parking enforcement and a lack of cheap parking.

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