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It's worth noting that it would also help any red/green colorblind drivers. Red/Yellow/Blue is a better choice, international standards be damned.
by maaark 9y ago
It's worth noting that it would also help any red/green colorblind drivers.
Red/Yellow/Blue is a better choice, international standards be damned.
- pja 9y agoUK traffic lights changed the green colour to something closer to cyan at some point for exactly this reason. (This might be an EU wide thing.)
- def0wt 9y agoYes, I've seen cyan led traffic lights in Spain and France. I think that's the new norm when led lights are introduced. I'd say it's for colorblindness sake mostly. They look exactly like the Japanese lights in the article. There are also some other strange norms in Europe, as the "orange" yellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light#European_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light#European_standar...
- pluma 9y agoWait, it's orange? I was always attributing that to my colorblindness. This might explain why I sometimes have a hard time telling the red and yellow signals apart. Thank you!
- Tijdreiziger 9y ago'Strange' depends on your frame of reference. In my (European) country, you would be ridiculed for suggesting that the middle colour on traffic lights should be yellow instead of orange.
- seszett 9y agoIt helps in the places where traffic lights can have different shapes, including horizontal, but I would imagine that it's not that much of a problem in most places where traffic lights are always vertical with green at the bottom?
- fenomas 9y agoAt night one usually only sees the light's color, not its position.
- pluma 9y agoI'm not sure whether you're also colorblind (experiences can differ) but I would like to disagree. The one thing that would make my life as a colorblind driver infinitely better (especially at night) are reflective frames. If every traffic light had a frame with a reflective rim, the shape would be far easier to spot than trying to find the right circular light in a sea of street lamps and neon signs. In Germany I actually fondly remember the old "warm" green lights very fondly. The more bluish LED ones they were replaced with are very difficult to tell apart from other lights at night and to me often appear almost plain white to my eyes. If they were even more bluish, I'd have an even harder time distinguishing them from other lights, especially if some jerk using Xenon headlights happens to pass me by.
- perilunar 9y agoSo now we've switched over to LED traffic lights, why are they still all circular and differ by colour only? It would be really easy to make them different shapes and colours. e.g. go = green + circular, stop = red + octagonal (like a stop sign), caution = yellow + triangular.