SEARCH BLOG: TECHNOLOGY
An interesting artifact of local roads in part of the Central Florida area are so-called "traffic signal confirmation lights" ... small, bright blue lights that appear over the traffic signals when the light is red. Apparently, the purpose of the blue lights is to assist law enforcement officers in determining that a vehicle has run through a red light.
Before I read why those blue lights were there ... the City of Oviedo website provided the explanation ... I thought the lights were added to assist Florida's older drivers or red-green color-blind drivers at night when poor vision or the inability to see the signal light position in the stack could add to the danger of going through a red light. I still think it would be a good idea in highly congested areas where speeds are in excess of 40 mph.
Of course, the best of ideas needs to be executed properly. At several intersections, the blue lights were on over one red signal, but off over the red light in the adjacent lane. Worse, sometimes they were off over the red signal and on over the left-turn lane signal that was green. Bad execution of techology is worse than the absence of the technology.
Technologies have a lot of unintentional consequences ... good and bad. Cell phones can be life savers or life takers depending on how, when, and where they are used. So it's not surprising that lights intended to help police make more certain arrests also assist some drivers in avoiding those arrests. Of course, the only technology that would really help with some of Florida's speeding, tail-gating drivers is a system that signals the car to brake when the approaching light is red. Maybe that's one for the future.
Still hunting and pecking on the iPhone touch screen. There is a foldable Bluetooth keyboard that has been developed to work with the iPhone... once Apple gets off it's collective butt and enables it's iPhone to work with the keyboard. The phone has Bluetooth capability, but for some reason Apple won't program it to work with the keyboard.
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