A Rant on Traffic Lights and Public Transport
A couple days ago, I was anxiously waiting to go forward at a traffic light, praying it would turn green quickly so that I could catch the BART. Imagine my frustration to see that not a single car had turned left or crossed the intersection. And, as if to add salt to injury, it felt like the signal lasted forever. Now, it could be just that my perception of time was affected by my strong emotions, but it got me paying attention to traffic lights. In the time since, I feel like I've noticed several instances where the light was clearly suboptimal.
It's 2026, why haven't we figured out traffic lights?
I know that some traffic lights have evolved to become very complex systems, and there's been a ton of research into this. But they could be better, and with all the advancements in computer science and machine learning, it feels as if it's a solvable problem. Adjacent to this is a big gripe I have with longer-distance public transport in the Bay Area like BART or Caltrain. From the East Bay, it feels as if there is a dead zone at the Peninsula, specifically at San Mateo county and the surrounding areas. I have a dream that one day I will be able to get on a BART train from the East Bay and reach any other city in the Bay in less than an hour. Seriously, the distance from the Hayward BART station to the San Mateo Caltrain Station is less than the distance from Hayward to Berkeley, but it takes a 7 minute BART ride, a 1 hour bus ride, and then another 20 minute Caltrain ride, and that's not even factoring the time spent waiting between each leg of the journey. It doesn't even have to be a train that connects the East Bay to the Peninsula; a dedicated bus lane would be enough! If I remember correctly, the Dumbarton Bridge has 6 lanes of traffic with 3 in each direction. A simple solution could be to have something like the zipper on the Golden Gate Bridge to have 3 lanes of traffic for the congested direction, a dedicated bus lane for that direction, and 2 lanes of traffic for the less congested direction (the busses traveling on the less congested direction don't need the dedicated lane). And you could charge the Big Tech companies that have their private buses money for using that lane! And the San Mateo bridge, at least the eastern span, is wide enough to allow for some tracks.
I hope that one day this dream of mine is realized.
Sid