Traffic lights could get new colors | Tech News

Traffic lights may change someday (Photo: Getty/iStockphoto)

Red, orange, and green traffic lights are pretty much the same all over the world and have been that way for over 100 years.

But scientists suggest that one day a fourth color could be added to help traffic flow around driverless vehicles.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are a relatively new concept, and there are no fully driverless cars on the road yet.

Waymo, a self-driving taxi company in California and Arizona, is getting close, having achieved Level 5, known as SAE4. Other AVs, including Tesla, are gaining traction as well.

Autonomous vehicles are not currently allowed on UK roads except for a few trials, but under motoring laws they could be allowed as early as 2026.

All of this means that soon our streets will be filled with a mix of human-driven and driverless cars.

The team claims their white light system could make traffic smoother (Photo: Getty)

To make this merger more seamless, engineers at North Carolina State University have proposed introducing white lights to traffic signals, which would help autonomous vehicles keep traffic moving and help human drivers understand what’s happening.

The idea, says lead researcher Dr. Ali Hajjababai, is to use the computing power of the autonomous vehicles themselves to figure out where each vehicle is.

He said the white phase concept incorporates new traffic signals to help human drivers know what to do.

A red light would still mean stop. A green light would still mean go. And a white light would tell human drivers to just follow the car in front of them.

White lighting is used when sufficient AV is available (Photo: Ali Hajbabaie/NC State University)

Publishing his paper in the Journal of Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, Dr. Hajjababai and his team created a series of computer simulations to help visualize how the new traffic light system would work.

The concept shows AVs communicating wirelessly with each other and with computers that control traffic signals. When enough AVs approach an intersection, the new traffic light system is activated.

The white lights let people know that the autonomous vehicle is adjusting its movements to allow traffic to pass through the intersection, while non-autonomous vehicles can simply follow the vehicle in front.

But until most cars are self-driving, the standard red, yellow and green lights will be used, and the systems will operate as they have for over 100 years.

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Researchers expanded their study to include pedestrians and found that the white phase concept helped improve traffic efficiency for both vehicles and pedestrians.

History of traffic lights

Traffic lights have a long history (Photo: Getty)

Traffic lights have a long history, first appearing outside the Parliament Building on December 10, 1868, over 150 years ago. In this rudimentary version, police operated red and green gas lights at night, and police controlled them.

Unfortunately, a few weeks later, on January 2nd, the gas pipeline exploded.

The first electric traffic lights were installed in Ohio in 1914, and a three-color system was first used in Detroit in 1919.

In Britain, the first three-colour manual traffic lights appeared in Piccadilly in 1926, while automatic traffic lights appeared in Princes Square, Wolverhampton, in 1927.

He said implementing the system would improve travel times, increase fuel efficiency and improve safety for everyone on the road.

Dr. Hajibabai said: If autonomous vehicles become nearly ubiquitous in the future, our models show that delays at intersections could be reduced by more than 25 percent.

More realistically, the percentage of wirelessly connected AVs on the road will eventually decrease, but travel times will still improve meaningfully.

You can contact our news team by emailing [email protected].

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