Lauren Weinstein@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org
I've recently been down the rabbit hole of this guy's #YouTube channel. He's a foreman for a firm in Mississippi that does install and maintenance work for traffic signals and related systems. The complexity of the tech running traffic lights, with camera-based car sensors, GPS synchronization, and so much more, is incredible. Inside those control boxes it looks like little data centers. One fascinating aspect is that they mostly (or perhaps all) have separate hardware that watches for conflicts to avoid the nightmare situation of lights being green in a way that could cause accidents, and mechanisms to force the lights into "flashing" mode when there are failures. Really fascinating stuff. Well, for me, anyway. - https://www.youtube.com/@Trafficlightdoctor
@SpaceLifeForm@infosec.exchange
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org
They do not need to be that complicated.
Basic Time-of-Day, Day-of-Week movement schedules is all that is required. If there are road sensors, then the periodic 'dummy cycle'.
The dummy cycle is for the dummies that do not understand why road sensors exist, and the driver either pulls up too far or not close enough to the line to get over the sensor. Then they wonder why they are not getting a green light.
I have seen people not figure this out because the signal controller was not programmed to do a dummy cycle. Needless to say, I passed them and ran a red light at an intersection with no traffic. They probably bought a vowel after I passed them.