The UK probabaly has more different designs of Traffic Light than any country I know. So much more interesting than all the identical lights here in NZ!
I like the idea of having the lights turn yellow first before green. Since I drive a manual here in America that would be so convenient for me to get my car in gear rather than rushing it the moment it turns from red to green.
I agree 100% as my vehicles are also manuals. Unfortunately, they shut down that idea here many decades ago but it appears to have been at least considered.
@@NipkowDisk The UK certainly still has a very high percentage of manual cars. That's not the case in NZ, where the vast majority of cars are automatic. Perhaps that it is why they never thought to introduce that light phase over here?
@@the_alex_ellis_channel6923 Quite possibly. I feel that if the red/yellow interval is not given, then they should mandate the use of "cadet" visors on the yellow so those who drive a manual can easily get a sneak peak prior to their green. The tunnel visors nowadays make it very difficult to see on the cross street...
Here in Russia we do both red->green (more common in Moscow) and red->red+yellow->green. Though on average, traffic lights with red+yellow before green are more common. In Moscow I think it's to stop drivers from going on red+yellow.
That Red and Yellow together thing before green. I thought it was exclusive of Buenos Aires City. I was in London some time ago and I don't remember seeing that.
@Northward Bound I don't think so. An infrared sensor needs a lens / mirror to focus where it is looking at, it is also set off by wind. (Look how many times your external sensor lights come on when its windy) a Microwave ignores wind and does not need a lens or mirror.
Aqui no Brasil esse amarelo junto ao vermelho é considerado ERRADO. Sou daqui de Belém e perto de um supermercado no distrito de Icoaraci,final de 2019 apresentou o modo inglês de funcionamento
The white border helps you bc the border is reflective so if the lights aren't working you could see them at night Edit: "safety feature" -instant honking-
Also when the first pelican crossings were introduced in the towns and cities in the UK in 1969 the name 'Pelican' was an acronym of 'PEdestrial LIght CONtrolled crossing'. These originally used sets of 1950s SGE traffic lights with the red man and green man pedestrian signals in a rectangular black steel box as back then the plastic 'Mellor' traffic lights which were supposed to be installed for pelican crossings were not introduced until 1972 onwards. The first pelican crossing to be installed in London in 1969 was located directly outside the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington.
1:43 Even Argentina Uses That Traffic Light Cycle Its Because Of Manual Gearbox Cars Are So Common There In The UK And Argentina. In Fact The UK And Argentina Are The Only 2 Two Countries Goes From Red Yellow To Green Because The West Of The World For Example The United States Canada Mexico New Zealand And Australia For Example Its Because Its Just Much Better For All Of US. I Find It Pretty Weird That Traffic Lights Go From Red Yellow To Green.
Very informative video! The traffic signals at 15:38 are made by Swarco and rebranded as SRL although SRL are a temporary traffic lights and signs provider but they are able to put their brand on it, kinda like with generic lift panels in a way With the pelican crossings that don’t flash, when they go blank they stay blank until all persons have left the crossing (by using another sensor like with the puffin) then the red man appears. Modern day Pelican crossings now do this as they realised this is a safer way of doing it as the green light for the traffic don’t come on until everyone is off the crossing TSEU was originally MicroSense and they merged with Traffic Signals UK before they became Telent. I wonder whether they are owned by the same people just with a new name because there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of old Telent traffic lights so I theorise that they are just renamed but don’t take my word for it as I cannot guarantee One more additional fact is that the reason many London traffic lights don’t have white trims on the outside is because as long as it is a 30mph road or less then you do not require white boarders so TFL don’t put on the white boarders unless it is a road above 30mph as it saves them additional costs.
Actually it’s a PEEK traffic light retrofitted to run on a battery. But yes the lenses are made by Swarco as they are Swarco retrofit units. It’s nice that they are reusing cases from old Peek Fibre Optics. The aluminium body is made by SRL themselves though.
Alex, I was filming some Peek Fibre Optic units and some knobhead rudely honked at us we drove past. So when you see that sequel video I made apologises for the idiot honking at us.
23:28 I pass that junction on the way to college and there is actually 3 Siemens sets on that junction. 3 fibre optics 2 are pedestrian lights and 1 Siemens LED. Like I don’t get the point I mean why put Fibre Optic traffic lights on a LED junction. Maybe it’s because some LED traffic lights aren’t very reliable. At some point PEEK will probably replace the fibre optics to PEEK LEDs again so the junction comprises fully of LED lights like it did when it was first installed in 2008.
I like traffic lights, no matter where they've been. I like traffic lights but only when they're green. He likes traffic lights. That is what he said. He likes traffic lights but not when they're red.
7:45 2024 update: this junction with a mix of mellor and peek traffic lights has now been replaced with Telent LED lights with countdown timers on the pedestrian men
I like the modern design of the TSEU traffic lights but I hate how small they are compared to other lights which can make it bloody hard to see the lights from far away. There is a set of TSEU traffic lights puffin crossing by my college that have the same control box which is actually called a logic cabinet and the cabinet says TSEU Group Traffic Signals UK Microsense on the metal label. So your theory is correct. Infact I’ve seen that on multiple TSEU lights.
Same my country used to have these when i googled and it said back in 90s and were mellor traffic light and after that they replaced all of it with cheap version :( and it often broke
The "fibre optic" you called , is probably a Fresnel lens. It's found in all CLS (central light source) LED aspects (for instance, the Swarco aspects at 2:00, the Siemens Helios CLS at 10:00, and the Peek Elite TLED 12V (marketed by SRL) at 15:30) . The real fibre-optic aspects used in the UK is a completely different thing.
@@SamuelBucathese are halogen traffic lights which are just the older ones before LED. Also, these are PEEK elite, not mellor like he said in the video!
This traffic light that the person is talking about said it has got LEDs in it which it does not it's got a clear glass lens on it if it was an LED traffic light he will be able to see LED diodes
Always a bit odd for me to see people keep left. Now the red-yellow (or red-amber as they call it in the UK) combination before green is the case is nearly all European countries except for the Netherlands, Belgium and France. There may be a few more exceptions, but Germany, Denmark and anything east of that uses that red-yellow-combo before green. (Now Belgium doesn't use it for normal car traffic, but light for trams and busses do feature the red-yellow, although red is then represented with a horizontal line and yellow with a dot, but the setup is other than that the same). Now that yellow flashing at pedestrian crossings is entirely new to me. Now I've never been in the UK before (unless you count my mother being there while she was still pregnant for me), but I haven't seen that system in any other country I've been before. In one way a bit confusing as flashing yellow is in most countries I know the traffic light is out of use (either because it's out of order, or because the traffic situation is not busy enough to justify leaving the traffic lights in operation), but I guess this only happening at pedestrian crossings and also happening pretty briefly make it up for that. So I guess I did learn something new today.
The flashing yellow phase is a dying breed, I think. When I lived in London, they used to be everywhere. Now on visits back (I have lived in New Zealand since 2007), there's hardly any. I've been to Birmingham a few times and seen a few up there - I'm actually in the UK right now and will heading up to Birmingham soon, so will have to see if they are still the same or not. A lot of Pelican crossings now have either changed the phase (some have even been replaced), or converted to Puffin Crossings.
2:39 I do hate when people just go by some traffic lights (probably mostly kids) and press the button when they don't cross I wish there was a penalty for doing stuff like that as if your in rush hour and people are needing to get somewhere you can get some tosser holding up traffic even more just pushing the button and walking off.
Many years ago I lived near a GEC traffic automation depot which had a huge skip outside. One day I walked by and there was a set of 4 complete signals on the poles together with 2 Autoflex pedestrian controllers. With no tools I couldn't remove the controllers but I managed to get a 1950's traffic head with the swivel adjustments (which I foolishly sold to my mate at school to use for his disco!).
I grew up in Wimbledon in the early 1980s and back then we still had the old ATE/Plessey tin lights from the 1950s on their black & white banded poles which were fascinating to watch along with their old 'Wait' and 'Cross Now' pedestrian signals. I remember in 1982 when all these were replaced by the plastic 'Mellor' traffic lights with the red man and green man pedestrian signals. We also had the original 1970s pelican crossings in parts of the London Borough of Merton with the 'Mellor' traffic lights and their white sight boards and bleeping audio signal. Also in the 1980s in places like Marylebone, Fulham and Chelsea were the old 1940s SGE traffic lights - they were fascinating to look at with their individual red/amber/green lights at the top of a single pole.
Excellent video. The variety of UK traffic signals is awesome. The incandescent lamps look a lot better, with the afterglow. But with a rush to get everything converted to LED, you documented some great UK history. I noticed that the low-pressure sodium lamps had disappeared in the night video.
NZ has a similar school zone setup (I find that it's only active during the times of day where kids are going to school and leaving school, at least in NZ anyway!) but you'll find that the UK uses the imperial system (mph) to measure the car speed, unlike NZ which uses the metric system (km/h). So 20 mph in the UK is the equivalent to 40 km/h in NZ, for the school zone speed limit
In the US, the yellow signal is about 1 second longer than in the UK (before turning red). I can count 1-1000, 2-1000, 3-1000, 4 before the light turns red. On the UK I can only do 1-1000, 2-1000, 3
The Belisha lamp in the museum was cool too. The NZ temporary traffic lights have a real estate sign type material on the outside surround. The phasing with Red/Yellow before Green is great. Pity NZ never adopted that. Those lens louvres are very cool. In Auckland there are some polarized glass lenses in use near Barry's point, North Shore. That Pelican flashing amber is very clever.
4:30, well, traffic lights near homes or anything similar to homes, there will be no beeps. (I haven't watched the whole video yet so this may have already been said.) Every crossing should have a knob underneath the box where you press the button to cross. It spins when the green man appears. I'm assuming this is for blind-deaf people. Edit: yep it has
The Puffin crossings should have the green / red man lights the same as the Pelican ones, ie the pedestrian can see the light on the other side while crossing. (Dangerous not to IMO) Wish we could have a flashing green like they do in Russia just prior to going red as this “should” reduce light jumping.
Nottingham lights are becoming more like the London style not so many taped versions A few years ago I bought a siemans rag head lantern (helios) with halogen lamps. Plus pedestrian and standard hoods along with the arrow masks and tapes. All this so I can switch styles. BTW, I use it in winter in my bedroom where it lives, as a heater-cum-coloured light unit.
I hope you enjoyed doing your survey! Another item that you didn’t see is the use of “part time” signals at some roundabouts, where they are sometimes not in use, i.e all black, depending on the traffic on various lanes, in an attempt to manage traffic flow on some routes. If anyone is interested in current standards, the latest bumf can be found here: www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-signs-manual Chapter 6 is the relevant one for traffic signals. Perhaps similar things are published in NZ and elsewhere; have fun.
The crossings similar to the pelican crossings but without the flashing amber phase and where the green man signal goes out for three seconds before the red man signal comes on (and the traffic lights show a red & amber phase instead of a flashing amber phase) are called 'Pedex' crossings.
I'm from Lincoln, Lincolnshire and we have some traffic lights which follow the London specification. I love the look of them, they are far better than normal traffic lights
in my country, most traffic lights have a seconds countdown in the main traffic light so we always know when the light change, some light count to 1 amd change, some count to 0 and change, some display one as 01 and some display one as 1
A lot of traffic lights in Stoke-on-Trent are replaced with Telent 4Gs, but since I live in Cheshire, I tend to see quite a fair bit of Siemens Helios and Peek sets, with an extremely rare chance of finding Mellor styled sets. As a matter of fact, I saw a couple of Mellors at my time in Blackpool!
The crossings where there is no audible sound to indicate when it is safe for pedestrians to cross are usually where there is a central pedestrian refuge and the pedestrians cross one carriageway, then wait in the centre before crossing the other carriageway. This is so that someone who is visually impaired doesn't hear the sound of the crossing on the far carriageway and assume it is safe for them to cross the near carriageway.
