Road Safety Institute studies number of traffic lights

The Belgian Institute for Road Safety (IBSR) has announced that it is examining the impact of the number of traffic lights in the country on a location-by-location basis. Motoring organisation Touring said it was in favour of losing half of all traffic lights, while a road traffic expert at Hasselt University (UHasselt) described a recent study on the subject as “nonsense”.

The study was carried out by the British think-tank Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which concluded that 80% of British traffic lights are superfluous. The amount of time cars spend standing still at lights leads to more pollution and to costs to the economy in productivity, the institute argued.

Danny Smagghe of Touring agrees. Carbon dioxide emissions increase by 28% at traffic lights and fine particles emissions by 7%, he said. “In the past, traffic lights were placed very generously in Flanders, usually at the request of local residents and municipal councils,” he said. “Not all of them have a positive effect on road safety by any means.”

Touring carried out its own survey at 100 locations and found that 50 sets of lights could be eliminated without any adverse effect.

But Willy Miermans, lecturer in traffic science at UHasselt, sees problems with the British study. He criticised the methodology, where the seconds spent waiting at lights were totalled up per driver and then multiplied by the number of drivers to calculate the effect on the economy.

“That’s nonsense. A million times nothing is still nothing,” he said. “It’s only when you don’t take the car at all that you begin to make a contribution to the environment.”

IBSR pointed to the role traffic lights play in road safety overall. “Traffic lights are installed to help avoid conflicts between road users, which helps cyclists and pedestrians feel safer,” said spokesperson Karin Genoe.

She pointed to a study where parents were asked about their willingness to send their children to school alone by bike or on foot. If traffic lights were removed in areas around schools, she suggested, parents might consider the environment less safe for walking and cycling – putting more cars on the road.

Photo: R/DV/RS/Flickr