Traffic lights don't work. I'm a pedestrian, cyclist and occasional driver, so am a user of lots of traffic lights, and they don't work. Their general usefulness has been called into question, and their "user interface" (UI) is non-intuitive. Almost any traffic light junction you visit will demonstrate that they just don't work properly, it at all.

Firstly, let's consider traffic lights in general. That basically covers lights at junctions and pedestrian crossings. We've all driven down streets and been stopped at what seems like every set of lights, often when there's no other traffic or pedestrians around. As Del Amitri sang, "the traffic lights change to stop, when there's nothing to go".

A few years ago, a chap called Hans Monderman realised that trying to make all road users 'automatons' wasn't the best approach. Instead, he realised that if everyone was required to make their own decisions, and take responsibility for themselves then actually everyone would benefit. He call this concept "shared space". Essentially, everyone gets to use the road, and has to avoid everyone else.

The UK government's own case-studies on the matter suggest that the experiment on High Street Kensington has been successful. There have been several articles on the subject in various journals.

We can't very well mention traffic lights without mentioning cyclists who jump the lights. It turns out men do this more than women, and because of that, women are more likely to die at at traffic lights by being crushed by an HGV. Aside from some very clueless cyclists who assume any space is a good space, don't understand how vehicles move and how drivers see, this sort of news is unlikely to quell the tides of cyclists that routinely skip the lights.

So much for the concept of traffic lights in general. We're a long way from getting rid of them, so while we've got them, we ought to find ways to get along with them. Here's where my next point, the "user experience" is completely wrong.

As pedestrians, we've all been taught from a young age that when you want to cross at the lights, you press the button and wait for the "green man" (who tends to be white in North America). Obviously, if you see a red man, then you wait.

As a kid, traffic lights were called Pelican Crossings. These particular junctions had a "flashing green man" stage, which indicated to pedestrians that the "red man" was coming, which would mean the traffic would want to start moving again. The road traffic would see "red" whilst the "green man" was on, and a flashing amber light around the time that the "flashing green man" was on. This flashing amber light denoting "you can go, if it's clear".

A number of UK councils have stopped installing Pelican Crossings and now use Puffin Crossings instead. Puffin Crossings use infra-red sensors to detect pedestrians, so keep the "green man" on while pedestrians are crossing. As soon as they're all gone, then it turns to "red man" and lets the traffic go, following a "red, red+amber, green" sequence. Haringey Council has a "guide to Puffin Crossings", which looks horribly complicated, and is sadly only available as a PDF. Newcastle's got a bit more information about the different types of crossing.

I can't find any decent reference about them, but a lot of lights seem to be a mixture of Pelican and Puffin - that is, they seem to have dropped the "flashing green man" stage in favour of no pedestrian light at all. Also, a lot of lights that used to only operate on half of the road seem to have been replaced with a single light for crossing the whole street in one go.

Here's where my "user experience" gripes come in. Firstly, the "no light" stage for pedestrians seems to be universally confusing. It's not really obvious if there's no working light, or if one should wait rather than cross, or perhaps one can hurry over and be okay. I guess here in the UK we're used to the idea of stuff not working, so the "oh, it's a broken light" response seems to be prevalent, especially as you can probably see some people apparently crossing the road, and the traffic dutifully waiting.

Having a "red man" when only half of the road has traffic on it is also confusing if there's a pedestrian island. If there's no island then it's pretty obvious what's going on. However, if you can see a "red man", but no traffic on "your part of the road" then should you cross? It's completely unclear what to do, and seems to confuse a lot of people.

So to recap... The validity of even having lights all over the place is in some question. Then we don't apparently understand the actual sequence of lights we see, because we all suspect that something's not working quite right because either the light is broken, or else it's perfectly okay to cross since other people are doing it. Then we've got cyclists jumping the lights as if they've been shown a green signal, and you've got a whole load of very confused pedestrians.

What ever's going on, one thing is clear: Traffic lights don't work.

This morning on the way to work, a whole load of waiting staff from Las Iguanas were having slalom races between the bollards on Meard Street. Sadly, one of 'em dropped the cutlery on his plates as he turned around at the end of the run (to much jeering from his colleagues). I wonder what the locals made of it all?

I received The Muppets Series 1 on DVD for my birfday. The GF and I watched a few episodes the other night - what utter genius The Muppets were! So episode one, sketch one is manamana! If that's not enough, Rowlf sings "Onions Make Me Cry", and gives us the basis for an excellent pun-related game to while away the hours in the office. And that's just for us adults... We all know what happened to the kids that watched it, don't we ;-)

I'm so tired of this problem. The BBC calculated that last year, the UK government had lost personal data on 4 million people. That's about 7% of the UK. We don't even have everyone on record yet, and they've lost that much.

Of course, the Home Secretary blames the private contractor, but that's just because they have one to blame. If this was all publicly run, she'd be the only person to blame. Somehow because she signed a contract with someone else, this exonerates her of responsibility.

Your government hates you. Please don't forget that.

Update 28th Aug, 08: It's been suggested to me that 'hate' is an overly strong word, and that it's unlikely that our government actually hates us. I still maintain it's not working in our best interest, at the very least though. Also, I get the last word ;-)

A friend of mine just invited me to a Facebook group called "the snowball effect" (it's an experiment to see if they can get all FB users to be a member of the group). I checked the group page, and found a discussion on the board entitled "Atheists, your logic is flawed!".

The thing is, that (amusing read) is just the start of it - the actual discussion board contains other such gems as "All girls on Facebook are fat" and "Do you know why I'm fucked up?". The mind boggles... These people need answers ;-)

I've spent a few evenings getting The Cat upgraded. We're now on Fedora 8, Drupal 6.3, a new Netgear router, gigabit ethernet networking, and a bunch of minor systemsy stuff to make the Cat fly.

By now you've probably noticed The Cat looks a little different. This theme scores much higher on the Yslow scale. I'm going to call this theme "unfinished" - I'm not really happy with it, but as these things go I expect I'll get used to it and leave it as it is for another year ;-)

Download Firefox!I just saw this ad on funponsel. I'm sure it's not new, but it, erm, caught my eye. I'm already fully Firefoxed up, so it doesn't apply to me :-(

(completely unrelated, but I'm also enjoying Toyology)

Update: Nope, it's not new in the slightest. The pic is also on Flickr and here. Also related: firefoxies (which is slightly dubious ;-)

Now that England aren't even in it, it may be hard for you to figure out who to support in Euro 2008. I know I'm stumped... Until now! This handy guide helps you decide via an easy pointy-clicky interface, so simple even I could manage it (via GCB).

Come on Romania ;-)

This time, your daily dose of Coofer Cat was disrupted by... a thunder storm. Around the same time there was a storm (apparently in the Essex area), my ADSL router mysteriously lost it's DSL signal, never to return.

It was high time I sorted a few things out, so now we're running on a Belkin modem/router/hub, rather than the elderly Linksys router, wireless and modem separates malarchy I had before.

Let's see if I can keep the Cat up for more than a couple of days at a time now...?

The ESA's opened up applications to be an astronaut for them (as of Monday 19th). Working in space is now officially not a military-only job.