Here's a surprising anecdote I've discovered living in South Africa wrt traffic lights.
When they're not working at a busy intersection in my area, the intersection effectively becomes a four way stop. And I've found that as long as everybody follows the rules, traffic actually seems to flow FASTER than when the traffic lights are actually operable.
Where I live they've been actively removing traffic lights. One strategy is to turn multi-lane roads into single-lane ones with a lower speed limit, and crossing islands for cyclists and pedestrians. Cars move slower, but more consistently, traffic is better able to self-regulate, so while I haven't timed it, I'm fairly sure traffic is actually moving faster despite driving at lower speeds.
Of course, it helps that infrastructure adjustments over the decades ensures that many people that don't need to be in cars, aren't in cars.
Sounds like you're living in a country where local government actually cares to improve things rather than doing as little work as possible while also self-enriching themselves as much as possible.
There's plenty to criticise at all levels of government here, but overall I indeed am pretty satisfied with my local government. And on the infrastructure level especially - whenever there are roadworks, they're annoying, but I'm always looking forward to what it'll end up as.
I see so many places that could have roundabouts instead of lights. Plus, if the maximum speed inside my town was lowered to 40km/h, we could have shorter yellows. You can never reach the 60km/h limit for more than a few seconds anyway.
Speaking for Johannesburg, we can't have shorter yellows because too many people treat them is "last chance to speed up to make it through before it's red for too long!" and JMPD is beyond useless at law enforcement.
Seriously though, speaking as a South African living basically next to Sandton, there are plenty of traffic lights near to me which cause complete chaos when they are out. They will cause significant delay for the entire working day on certain routes, e.g. anywhere on Winnie Mandela (formerly William Nicol) Drive.
There is however one intersection (Stirling and Balmoral Ave) on the way to my kid's school on a non-major road which definitely works better when its traffic light is out, and this is at any time of day in my experience.
Some traffic lights definitely should rather be mini traffic circles, e.g. on Peter Place by the one office park and had the exact same frustration for the one on Grosvenor Road near to Bryanpark.
As the Johannesburg Road Agency (like all City of Johannesburg Municipal companies) is so incredibly incompetent, our traffic lights are incredibly unreliable, I shudder to think how much it sucks out of our economic output all the people sitting in traffic longer than is needed simply due to an out of order traffic light.
And the local police also don't help with regular roadblocks while at the same time being terrible at law enforcement (yes, you'd think roadblocks are a sign of law enforcement, in practice though they're more for soliciting bribes while screwing up traffic).
If the lights are at an intersection where a very busy road crosses with a less busy road then turning it into a four way stop just turns it into a traffic jam on the very busy road. I’ve seen this happen during rush hour in the United States multiple times.
When it’s not rush hour though maybe the situation is different? Not sure.
So I've always thought what if each of our individual consciousnesses is like a radio frequency that is unique to each individual? This would explain why we regain consciousness when we wake up, because our physiology is locked to whatever that frequency happens to be.
Under this model, 'you' don't actually reside inside your skull. Instead, your brain is just biological hardware translating a non-local broadcast, meaning our core identity exists independently of the body.
That unique frequency "fingerprint" is close enough in pattern to every other human being that we're able to "understand" each other a process that might manifests in interesting but complex ways eg love and empathy
This is pure pseudo-science at its finest. You're using sciencey words without putting any real meaning behind them. A frequency has to be a frequency of something (e.g. an electromagnetic wave). There would also have to be a mechanism that would explain why each body is tied to exactly one and only one "frequency" throughout its entire life, and why it never happens that different bodies share a consciousness; and there are thousand other things - but I'll stop here as I've already put more thought into this non-idea than it deserves.
Many years later and I'm still bitter that the tech press laughed Windows Phone out of the room straight to its demise. Yes it had very little developer support but at some point things were looking up. It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people.
A third ecosystem right now would have been amazing
> The Windows phone didn't make it due to Microsoft failing to compete
As I recall Microsoft threw quite a lot of resources into Windows Phone.
My then-employer had apps for Android and Apple, and Microsoft literally paid for us to port it to Windows Phone. Microsoft brought Nokia, who had dominated the industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
And Microsoft was early to the mobile party too - you could get an iPaq H3660 running Microsoft Pocket PC 2000, seven years before the first iPhone. Keyboardless Fujitsu and Compaq tablets ran Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in 2003, seven years before the iPad.
They weren't as good as what came later. Chunky, fragile devices, resistive touchscreens, stylus input with a tiny on-screen keyboard, worse batteries, worse wifi, barely any mobile data. And at the time, $500 seemed hugely expensive compared to a normal phone, even if these days there are plenty of $1000 smartphones.
But there's an alternate reality where Microsoft had a 'first mover advantage' and captured a big slice of the smartphone-and-tablet market.
It was Microsofts fault. I had a Windows Phone just to play with it (besides an iPhone), Nokia Lumia. Just when Windows Phone 7 was getting some traction, Microsoft axed it and rebooted the ecosystem. None of the popular phones that ran Windows Phone 7 got the Windows Phone 8 update. To make it worse, Windows Phone 8 apps were not compatible with Windows Phone 7.
So Microsoft basically said: "as a thanks for being an early adopter, you know have to buy a completely new phone again". For reference, Windows Phone 7 was initially released in October 2010 and Windows Phone 8 in October 2012. After that many (technically-inclined) early adopters left.
Zune was also... not good. I was given one. It was defective. I think I got a warranty replacement and gave it to a friend who basically never used it as far as I know.
Nadella's Azure play basically saved Microsoft in my opinion. They totally blew mobile and desktop Windows and Office were declining markets and XBox was a sideshow.
I long for something like the first gen Zune that just worked. Great aesthetics and screen for the time. Replaced with an iPod Touch which was nice but entirely forgettable.
>> It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people.
I loved my Windows phones (especially near the end when you were getting Pixel & Apple level hardware for pennies on the dollar), but is this really true? They had limited hardware partners (and the disaster with Nokia), lukewarm carrier deals, absolutely no apps, but who were these "influential people" who made fun of it? If anything it seemed more like no-one was even aware of it. I remember the little press they did get being quite positive on the devices & OS, while critical of the broader ecosystem, which seems fair.
Given what Microsoft has done with the state of Windows with built-in telemetry, the attempts to add Recall, and now AI features they are adding to many customers dismay, you have them doing anything different with Windows Phone if it had gained traction than Apple and Google?
Lack of applications. They decided to fix that by adding an Android subsystem, and nobody wanted to publish their Android applications to the Amazon store even with Amazon throwing gobs of money at publishers and only some APIs having been moved into Google Play Services.
Eh, Microsoft got bored of developing their own browser and just pushes Chromium on their users now. Probably they would have just turned Windows Phones into another Android too.
When they're not working at a busy intersection in my area, the intersection effectively becomes a four way stop. And I've found that as long as everybody follows the rules, traffic actually seems to flow FASTER than when the traffic lights are actually operable.
I've timed this a few times.
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