FINALLY ....

This technology, while welcome, is nothing new. The biggest obstacles to this tech in my city (Brisbane, Australia) is bureaucracy. The state government owns/maintains some roads and the local government others. I have explored this problem with my local member of parliament. It seems their inability to work together means the environment, people\'s patience and time suffer. To date, no work has been attempted to rectify this seemingly simple to fix problem. Capitalism is probably the best political system in the world, but damn it\'s got some serious problems! Stefan Lämmer and Dirk Helbing, good work. It is through awareness and effort that these problems will be addressed. That and a lot of political will.

@Australian: Capitalism is NOT a political system. It\'s an economic one. Democracy, for example, is a political system. Political systems are based on laws while economic systems are based on markets. It\'s a huge difference. A political system based solely on capitalism (\"let the markets decide [people\'s lives]\") usually leads to Oligarchy, which is essentially the dystopia of Orwell\'s 1984.
Now that that\'s out of the way, long have I dreamed of a smart traffic light. It\'s embarrassing that it has taken this long for there to be a viable option. The traffic lights we have now are grossly inefficient and wasteful.

This is an idea who\'s time has come. If you think about all the gas wasted and smog produced by cars stopping and starting because traffic lights are not letting traffic flow. So many times I have seen one car at a light stop dozens of other cars when, if the light waited just a few seconds longer, the single car could have passed and not interfeared with all of the cross traffic.

I do hope these lights will take bicycles and light motorbikes into consideration. I have been stopped and unable to trip the sensor because I don\'t weigh a ton. I applaud this work as I have seen first hand dis coordinated lights that stop most of the traffic twice and thus cause much more traffic stoppage than they should.

I wonder if this kind of global thinking with local acting will really work in, say, Paris or Manhattan. Peoria, maybe.

Are you having a larf? The SCOOT and SCATS system do exactly this, and have been controlling thousands of traffic lights around the world for over 30 years. Please let the Germans know!

Traffic \"engineers\" --in reality, bureaucrats-- can easily address signal timing issues. They just don\'t want to, because to improve/optimize timing would essentially kill their pet projects, like spending cubic dollars on mass transit systems. How else to make people think that mass transit is the answer by having people sit in endless-seeming gridlock. That\'s exactly the case here in Honolulu, where a few years ago the bus drivers went on strike. Even with our 19th century traffic-signal technology the \"engineers\" improved signal timing to expedite the flow of traffic, assuming more cars would hit the streets. It worked. Traffic just flowed. Then, when the bus drivers returned to work, the signals went back to \'stupid\' mode. The mayor, upon being elected, promised to improve signal timing, but discovered his political golden goose in the form of a light rail system, so he promptly forgot all about his earlier promise.

some years ago whilst on a motorcycling tour of Europe I visited Cologne which had a system that used computer signs showing the speed you needed to maintain to get a green traffic light on the ring road. If you followed the small signs showing the required speed you got a green light at every set of lights

For America, this would best be addressed by Federal regulation and energy policy, backed by funding mandates.

No point in pushing for exotic expensive fuels of the future, and 60MPG standards, if we\'re just idling away gas wastefully sitting at \"dumb\" red lights.