- Motors
SEEING RED
A West Coast town takes the top spot as most likely to slow you down at red lights
- Kristen Brown, Freelance Motors Reporter
STUDIES have shown that a small town carries the largest chance for drivers to be stalled by frequent red lights.
Drivers in one U.S. city have a roughly 50 percent chance of becoming stuck at a red light - and it's not the one you're likely to guess.
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California has three cities in the top 10 cities with the highest population count, so it's not shocking to find a city from the Golden State on the list of cities that experience the longest traffic delays from red lights.
The first city that came to mind was likely Los Angeles, as the population figures from 2022 were 3.8 million per the census report.
San Franciso or San Deigo are strong contenders for the title, or San Jose, as all three were listed in the 2020 census as top 10 densely populated cities.
However, all of those cities would be shockingly false guesses.
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Looking to the Central Valley, Fresno toppled the national average delay times due to red lights by a staggering amount, according to Your Central Valley for 2022.
The report from Texas A&M's Transportation Insitute looked at data from 210,000 traffic lights from 101 cities for seven days in October 2020 to establish a "Traffic Signal Efficiency Index" for each city under evaluation.
"American drivers share a common experience – and sometimes a common frustration – with traffic signals every day," said Luke Albert, a research engineer who complied and reported the data.
"We’ve developed a way to compare those experiences from one city to another."
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With the data, researchers determined a number that measured how likely someone would drive up to a green light instead of a red light.
The number was calculated to be 1.7, which means a driver was 1.7 times more likely to encounter a green light over a red light.
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Fresno's average, however, was 1.1 - so drivers have a roughly 50 percent chance to face a red light over a green light.
The city has made traffic-related headlines, with Friant and Shepherd Avenue being ranked as one of the state's most dangerous intersections.
The intersection is plagued by those who run red lights due to long wait times, which frequently causes accidents.
Dan and Cory Wells, a father-son duo, have lived close to the intersection for over 30 years, and have made a name for themselves on YouTube for posting videos of drivers running red lights and causing accidents.
Seeing red - the worst US cities for traffic lights
Larger cities in California were still on the list of cities where drivers were more likely to hit a red light
San Diego and San Jose were still below the national average index of 1.7 at 1.3 - noticeably less than Fresno's 1.1 index. So, drivers in those cities had a 56 percent chance of hitting a green light instead of a red light.
Other California cities scoring low on the list include:
- Riverside
- Bakersfield
- Sacramento
- Los Angeles
- Palmdale
- Stockton
The San Francisco Bay Area scored surprisingly higher than the national average with a score of 1.7.
The other cities that scored low were as follows:
- Corpus Christi, Texas
- Jackson, Mississippi
- McAllen, Texas
- San Jose, California
- Boston, Massachusetts
- Wichita, Kansas
- Riverside-San Bernardino, California
- Worcester, Massachusetts
- San Diego, California
- Brownsville, Texas
- Providence, Rhode Island
- Tucson, Arizona
- Las Vegas, Nevada
- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
15 cities scored high, and not one of them was from California.
"[The intersection has] always been an issue," Dan told The Fresno Bee last year.
"We hear it every night. We hear every wreck."
Councilmember Garry Bredefeld said the issue wasn't with the intersection, but with drivers being impatient and resorting to illegal measures to save time.
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"There are too many people who think it’s OK to run red lights and like to text and cause problems on our streets," he said.
"Those that violate our traffic laws and drive recklessly... must be held accountable."
