Tuesday, 21 June 2011

Greek Traffic Light Fun

If you fast forward to 1 min 33 seconds into this clip, the reporter says that workers at a power plant in Greece went on strike, which "left large parts of the mainland with no electricity [cut to picture of traffic lights which are clearly off] and throwing traffic into chaos".

Problem is, the traffic in the background is flowing smoothly - I don't know whether traffic slows even more smoothly than this in Greece when the lights are 'working', of course - but turning off the traffic lights doesn't appear to have made things noticeably worse.

3 comments:

Quiet Guy said...

Reminds me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS_wjo378h4

A K Haart said...

For over twenty years I followed the same route into the city, passing through about forty sets of traffic lights.

Over all those years, with quite a few light failures noted, I didn't see any difference between failed and working. If anything, traffic flow may have been a little quicker when they were off.

Mark Wadsworth said...

QG, yes, me too.

AKH, most people observe that things speed up markedly without the lights, see for example the video linked to by QG.