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The lights should be designed so that if you don't have enough space to stop with a mild deceleration you should just go through. If a mild deceleration get you rear ended then of course that's an unsolvable problem

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No one wants to risk a ticket with a guess at how long the yellow is going to be, or whether they’ll make it thru or not. That is the unsolvable part. Yellows are inconsistent , and you aren’t accounting for slow-moving traffic ahead of you that might cause you to block the intersection, etc.

There was actually a scandal in Chicago were a study found that the city systematically reduced the length of yellows only on lights that had red light cameras in order to harvest tickets.

I feel like the subtext of all these concerns is that you'd need to drive very carefully to reliably avoid camera tickets... and nobody wants to drive that carefully. I get it, I don't either, and I do get occasional camera tickets. But like: I should also be driving more carefully.

Slamming on the breaks because you’re anxious about a yellow light is not careful driving. But that’s what red light cameras do

Then they shorten the yellow so that it isn't "with a mild deceleration" but a full-on stomp-on-the-brakes stop.

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