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Comment by mianosm | Hacker News Reader

It is an interesting scenario that they play out in Toronto. However, this is a programmatic feature built into the traffic systems - and in the current location I live in completely different.

Here the countdown hits zero well before the lights shift to yellow and finally red. Perhaps Toronto needs to readjust if there is a high number of rear-ends occurring due to drivers going off of the pedestrian control devices instead of vehicle control devices.

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Good point. Here for some reason the pedestrian light is 15 second even if the traffic is going to be flowing in that direction for 45 sec. You can hit the button and it'll start counting down again.

My experience is that the light changes to yellow as the countdown reaches zero.

Here in Phoenix most work this way, but when a road crosses central avenue the walk counter hits 0 and then there is about a 10 second delay before the traffic lights change.

The problem is, people have realized this. So peds continue to begin crossing as the counter gets low (central has a lot of ped crossing because the light rail runs down the middle of the road).

They really ought to reverse that. Make the light shorter for cars and drivers can no longer use the countdown clocks as a signal. They'd have to actually look at their own light. Combine that with starting the pedestrians early and you make it much harder for drivers to be jerks.

I've seen both. On wide multilane roads I've seen the coundown hit zero and the "don't walk" signal come on before the traffic light changes to yellow. On narrower crossings the yellow tends to appear as the counter hits zero or very shortly after.

That's similar to what I've seen in the NY suburbs; I've noticed that the counter hitting zero is when the traffic light goes yellow.

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