Research has shown that increasing yellow-light times leads to a decrease in the number of accidents at busy intersections.
Like Chicago's Sussman, plaintiffs in the lawsuit claim that yellow-light times are less than the three-second minimum.
In Tampa, Fla .-- which has a red-light camera program -- lengthening yellow-light times led to fewer accidents and reduced ticket revenue.
At one intersection, yellow-light times were adjusted from 3.9 seconds to 4.8 seconds on Dec. 3, according to WTSP 10 News Tampa, and "the result was a 79percentt drop in citations -- 52 violations issued in December, compared with a 259/month average through 2013's first 11 months". Other intersections saw similar results, with one intersection seeing a drop of $30,000 a month in ticket revenue.
Most remarkably, the rapid onset and offset kinetics of Halo allowed the deletion of even single spikes specifically, the second yellow light pulse, timed to silence just spike 17, was able to eliminate spike 17 without affecting neighboring spikes 16 or 18 at all.
He says he does not intend to encourage reckless driving but simply wants to protect drivers who make innocent mistakes -- like driving through a yellow light without sufficient time to stop when it turns red, or traveling just a few miles an hour above the posted speed limit.
The bulbs, which are controlled by a dimmer, are programmed to change from white light to yellow light depending on the time of day, location, season and weather.
"I remembered the event very well, because it seemed at the time that the yellow light duration was much shorter than normal," he wrote.
Finally, we presented the light pulses and the somatic current injections simultaneously (Fig. 4A, "I-injection±light", three trials shown), and discovered that strikingly, spiking was blocked precisely during the periods of yellow light exposure, and at no other times.
