> "be smart and detect actual traffic for modifying the red light behavior in real time" This is something I've been frustrated by for years. "Autonomous Cars"

> "be smart and detect actual traffic for modifying the red light behavior in real time" This is something I've been frustrated by for years. "Autonomous Cars" are hard. Autonomous traffic lights should be much easier. Here in the suburbs there are tons of stoplight intersections between small residential neighborhoods and central arteries where cross traffic is fairly rare. There are sensors in the roadway to detect cars waiting but they are still incredibly slow to change as they seem to stick to minimum timers during most of the day. The crazy part is that one or two cars waiting to cross often wait two minutes for the apparent timer to expire and the light to change while there was no oncoming traffic the other way that would have been inconvenienced by an immediate change. The cross-traffic cycles are very short anyway because there's only a couple cars at most. Even more perverse is the number of times I sit waiting two minutes with no approaching cross traffic in sight from either direction, then when some cars are finally approaching, then it stops them with a red so I can cross. A semi-smart system based on a Raspberry Pi-level SBC with a camera would have had me on my way while no one was coming. It seems like in the aggregate camera-based autonomous traffic lights could save enormous amounts of fuel and time.