How often do you find yourself sitting needlessly at a traffic light? I’m not talking morning commute gridlock, but rather, sitting at a red light when there are no other cars on the road, or sitting at the 3rd, 4th, or 5th red light in a row because of poor light timing? You may not know it, but sitting at a red light costs millions of dollars a year in wasted fuel, not to mention countless hours of wasted time. In fact, up to a gallon of fuel or more an hour burns when you’re just idling and sitting at a traffic light. In addition, stop and go city driving is what causes gas mileage to plummet when driving in the city. Owners of hybrids are lucky because their gas engines turn off automatically, providing one of the primary methods for hybrid cars to save fuel. Also, hybrid cars have regenerative braking, which pumps power back into the car’s batteries when the brakes are applied, thus recouping some of the lost energy when applying the brakes.
In San Jose and Santa Clara, it’s estimated poor traffic light management wastes over $3 million dollars a year in fuel. Fortunately, the California Transportation Commission is coming to the rescue with a $52 million allocation to improve lights throughout the Bay Area, including cities in the Silicon Valley such as San Jose and Santa Clara. Some signals will simply be smarter, allowing cars at rail crossings to go first if they have been waiting the longest. Other signals will be connected to traffic control centers, allowing lights to dynamically adjust based on traffic conditions.
For those who drive certain routes daily and see cases of poorly timed lights, take the time to write or call the city. In particular, you will more often than not have a traffic department. Making them aware of poor traffic light timing patterns will at the very least bring attention to the problem. No one knows the roads better than those of us who drive them every day. Often, the latest technology isn’t needed to help bring small improvements. In fact, simple timing changes can be the quickest to implement and help the most.
As gas prices break through $4 per gallon, drivers are becoming painfully aware of how driving habits, traffic light timing, general congestion, and other factors add up to even more pain at the pumps. It’s great to see money being set aside to help address traffic light timing issues. In fact, I’ve even met some folks who have Masters degrees in Traffic Engineering. This type of work is right up their alley, and we should get them working as quickly as possible. Who isn’t for saving time, gas, and money?
Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It is a humongous, Texas sized section of the Pacific ocean where garbage that finds itself in the Pacific ocean collects. It collects there because currents in the ocean form a whirling vortex, known officially as North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and that’s where the garbage eventually ends up.
If you’re wondering why that’s bad, consider the effect on animals. Greenpeace estimates that over a million sea-birds and one hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by ingestion of plastics or entanglement. Like this one here, whose stomach is full of plastic it mistakenly ate.
It occurred to me recently, as I was cleaning up some mess I made, that I use too many paper towels. The NRDC estimates that if every household in the United States used one less roll of paper towels, we could save 544,000 trees.