Yes, well, the green wave is a good idea in principle, but it's sorta mistaking averages for reality. There is this thing called the "waiting time paradox" [0]

Yes, well, the green wave is a good idea in principle, but it's sorta mistaking averages for reality. There is this thing called the "waiting time paradox" [0] (or more generally the "inspection paradox") that suggests a surprising thing, the average time between discrete events observed by many other randomly interspersed observation is the same as the average time between events. This should be surprising, because it suggests that many more people experience times LONGER than the average wait to balance out people who experience a shorter wait because they were randomly closer to the event. This happens because longer intervals, when they do exist, get a larger proportion of the random observations than the shorter intervals between events. More precisely and generically, when the quantity being observed affects the observer, the observations will be distorted by the quantity in question and have to be normalized. In the case of a green wave, those rare times when someone waits too long on a green because they were looking at their phone or a naked person in a nearby window and create slowdowns and stalls in the pipeline? Those moments are longer, so there is a longer window where you could experience them. This actually comes up a lot in observations of things in nature. Imagine if instead of light flips or bus arrivals we were observing clicks on a geiger counter and you'll realize how fundamental this is to experiencing the world. tl;dr: The Green Wave only works in averages and it can be correct even as your experience of it never working is also correct. :) [0]: https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2018/09/13/waiting-time-paradox/ https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2018/09/13/waiting-time-parad...