Does this annoyance sound familiar to you?
You pedal your bicycle up to a traffic light and sit there waiting for it to change. If it uses a trigger mechanism installed in the blacktop, you could sit there a very long time — maybe forever if you're riding an aluminum or carbon bike.
Eventually you meekly roll over to the crosswalk and hit the pedestrian crossing button, or take matters into your own hands and just blow the traffic light when no cross-traffic is coming.
Bicyclists in Santa Clarita, California, might not get to play out that drama much longer on two roads. The city has requested $390,000 from the state Bicycle Transportation Account to install cameras mounted on traffic lights to detect bicyclists waiting at traffic signals.
Detecting bikes
Video detection of bikes waiting at intersections sounds like a great idea, although it's not widely used.
While magnetic loops installed in roadways work for motor vehicles, the effectiveness of those loops for bicycles is spotty at best.
Even specially configured loops designed to detect non-metallic bicycles don't seem to work regularly. Either they aren't located where you stop in the intersection or they are installed incorrectly.
Bicycling advocate John S. Allen has written that besides being ineffective for a number of reasons, the loops raise antagonism toward bicyclists when motorists see them blowing through red lights. The cyclists, he explains, have been conditioned to not expect the light to change for them.
Video detection
A few years ago, the Federal Highway Administration researched alternative methods for detecting bicycles at intersections and found technologies that use video, infrared, microwave and a combination of infrared and ultrasound.
The video detector uses a camera attached to a pole or traffic signal and a computer with image processing capability.
Tech transfer research at UC-Berkeley reported the video cameras can take in a wide area and be easily adjusted. The intersections must be well lit, however, to detect bicyclists after dark. Sometimes the shadows of passing cars will trip a video bike detector as well.
Bike commuting fund
Transportation officials in Santa Clarita, located in Los Angeles County, consider the video detection camera superior to the loop detectors currently in use there because “they are not dependent on metallic objects for vehicle detection.”
The $390,000 in funds they're seeking comes from California's Bicycle Transportation Account, which grants about $7.2 million a year to project that improve safety and convenience for bicycle commuters.
If they get the money, the video bike detectors will be installed along Bouquet Canyon road from Seco Canyon Road to Plum Canyon Road, and Soledad Canyon Road from Canyon Country Park to Shadow Pines Boulevard.
Turning red to green
Let's hope this technology catches on, not just for the convenience to bike riders but also their safety. Video bicycle detection also is in use in Washington County, Oregon and Santa Cruz, California.
Until then, it's probably worth reviewing “Making Traffic Lights Turn Green,” which appeared a few years ago in a League of American Bicyclists newsletter and is reprinted at the Seattle Bicycle Club website.
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