Ideas - Why yellow traffic lights were invented to be ambiguous

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

The yellow traffic light is a perfect example of imperfection — with intention. While driving you have to think fast. Do you speed up or stop, whether that means easily or slamming on the brakes? Every driver has their answer and what lies in the middle is a vast perceptual field. A great deal of thought has gone into the engineering of the ambiguous yellow light, as IDEAS producer Seán Foley found out. He had his own encounter with what he was sure was the shortest yellow light in the world. It resulted in a traffic fine, and gave voice to so many questions.

This message is from Wise, the app for international money. With Wise, you can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with a fair exchange rate and no hidden fees. Download the Wise app or visit wise.com. T's and C's Apply. This is a CBC podcast. As people start to anticipate longer yellow, some people will have more tendency to speak. speed up to get through them because they know they're longer and you have cautious drivers that'll still try and break and you get into this issue of causing a cautious driver to stop too early and a driver who's anticipating a longer umber to go through it so i think and they have more time

yeah it gets complicated yeah welcome to ideas i'm nala ayad and i mean and this is this is the thing i think is so fascinating about it like you can calculate the human element But you can't nail it down as such. And, like, one of the things I could say for myself is that I think for a time, I, oh, we've got to, maybe I'll let this go through because it could be hard to edit around the emergency vehicle. Ideas producer Sean Foley at an intersection in Whitby, Ontario, about an hour east of Toronto.

We'll watch the signals for a second, too, and just see what we observe. but are they able to change the signal to get through it? Yeah, so you'll see the the walk clearance came up as soon as the fire truck came in. Okay. And there's a, it's called a preemption, and the fire truck will trigger that to get it to change. Okay. Wow. But you still, you can't just kind of flip it to green right away.

You have to allow for pedestrian time clearance to happen and then the yellow and everything. That's amazing that you can see that. He's standing here. And I wouldn't even, I'd be like, oh, fire truck. So loud. Yeah, the thing of working in traffic signals is you're always kind of at work, because every time you're driving around, you're looking at signals. Even if you're in another city, you're looking, oh, what are they doing?

You're checking a seal, what kind of times are they using? There's always something to look at. But for most of us, traffic signals are just part of the environment and not something we think about all that much. Environments are invisible. Their ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception. The words of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan describing what we're basically dealing with all the time, whether the fish knows what water is.

Yeah. But fish don't have to drive cars, meaning they don't have to deal with yellow lights. or, if you will, Amber, traffic signals. My point exactly, Nala. Fish have it easy. They do have it easy. It's so easy. They're so tasty.

So we've got fish, we've got traffic lights, we've got Marshall McLuhan. So let me ask you this, Sean. What exactly is your point? Well, to be honest, I'm not sure yet. Beyond the fact that there are things in our midst that we never really think about. Anything like that come to mind. for you? Well, I wanted to stay kind of in the traffic motif. So I was thinking about

sidewalks. Does that fit? Yeah. We never think about sidewalks. Yeah, you just need them. Yeah. And I think it's as soon as maybe you end up in a place where there's no sidewalk. Yeah, that's when you start to notice things. It's true. There's actually a street near my home where it's kind of like being back in

Winnipeg. Some areas on the outskirts of town where there's grass that extends all the way to the street and it does feel weird. You notice that. Your brain clocks that it's hazardous. Yes, to not have a sidewalk? Yeah, to not have a sidewalk.

That's when you notice that they're useful. Then the sidewalk freezes and all of a sudden that's hazardous. Dangerous sidewalks. How do we get by, Noah? How do we get by? I don't know. So this was my vague relationship with the amber signal until a red light camera flashed in the silence of a summer night and just kind of expose the whole thing

for me. So this thing that you never thought much about, now it appears that it has your complete attention and ours too. So what's next? Well, once I got past the outrage and embarrassment, to be honest, I think my ideas producer brain kicked in. You know, what is with yellow lights? Like, how do they do what they do and even more ideas-y?

What's the inner game when the light turns amber? Like, what does that moment consist of in my brain? I was convinced that that was the shortest yellow light in history. And that made me wonder, what did I just perceive? Yeah. You know? But you've just, I mean, this is exactly what we do on ideas. Take an idea, crack it open, and look at it every which way.

So it definitely fits the genre. You're on the right show. But what ultimately convinced you that this particular idea was worth pursuing? Well, usually I rely on research. And there's definitely a lot of material. on yellow lights, but I'm also looking for a sign sometimes to, like, commit. And just a couple of days after this incident, I had an interesting experience at a summer social gathering, making small talk with an acquaintance.

And of course, if you've recently had a traffic infraction and you're feeling bad about it and you're with a friendly enough person, you might just be like, yeah, this happened to me, you know, so I thought maybe I'll just, he seems very receptive to what I'm saying. So maybe I'll just try out my idea that I'll do a documentary about yellow lights and he he said. I work in traffic in Durham region and I actually just, I didn't tell you that I changed jobs last week. So, yeah. All right. Is that good? Yeah, yeah. It's good. It's good. More into what's the ITS, so intelligent transportation systems. So dealing more with kind of the software that's involved with some of our traffic systems. Yeah. Well, he didn't say it quite like that at first. But the point is,

it turns out that my friend Travis is a traffic control professional. Wow. And I had no idea. So you're standing at that intersection in Whitby, Ontario? Yes, at Brock and Taunton streets with my friend Travis stalking. And that's where this episode begins. And we're calling this episode? Indecision Zone, the yellow light and you.

Yeah, so it's really, whenever we're looking at an intersection, we'll be looking at traffic flows. So we're ideally, you're trying to. trying to keep everyone flowing. So the idea behind that and what we do and the signal systems is coordinating the lights. So you're trying to get what's called a platoon, so that's a group of cars traveling along the road to arrive at the light when it turns green.

Now it's simple in theory, but more complicated in practice because the platoon will change or once there's a platoon, cars will get in front of it. So that's kind of the... There's almost an art to it where, you know, you can make it look perfect on paper, but in a practical sense, it doesn't always work out the way you might model it or something.

So a lot of what we end up doing is come out here after you've set the timings and then just look at it, watch, see what's happening, and fine-tune, make adjustments, and try and get traffic flowing where possible. Now, this intersectionally said, is one of the busier ones, and part of that is at a certain point an intersection is at capacity. so it won't matter what you do with the traffic signals there's just not enough capacity to get every vehicle that's arriving within a set of time through that intersection and that's where you get congestion and delay so this one can this one can reach capacity fairly easily during peak times for sure yeah you would have just too many vehicles trying to get through the intersection at the same time so it's like all platoon yeah yeah it's just constant flow so that's uh yeah that point you just do what you can and that's generally when people start to get upset but that's uh that's how it goes so um you know my my documentary is focused on this mysterious

thing called the yellow light or the amber signal what would you describe as the purpose of an amber signal so so the amber signal i mean if you think about it if you didn't have the amber signal and you just went from green to red you wouldn't you'd have a lot of people slamming on brakes or a lot more confusion. And what the amber signal essentially tries to do is alert a driver that's at what's, you know, they'll call the dilemma zone or the indecision zone, I think it's a preferred term. And what that is, is when you're approaching an intersection, it gives you a warning that the signal is about to change. Traffic signals had been around for about 50 years before the amber signal and the

tricolor traffic light were invented. A Detroit police, officer, an inventor named William Potts, realized that with increased driving speed came the need for extra time to stop at intersections to ease the transition from green to red. He took inspiration and the yellow or amber color from railway signals, which were well established by that point. His first tricolor four-way traffic signal was suspended over the intersection of Woodward and Michigan Avenues in Detroit in October 1920. And what we try and do with the yellow light is give that warning when you're at a location where you can either stop safely, so not having to jam on the brakes. Or if you are so close that you would have to jam on the brakes, you can maintain your speed and get into the intersection before it turns red.

And then on the all-red clearance, which is when the signals in all directions are red, allow you to clear the intersection. Right. And so this idea of the dilemma zone, or as you say, the indecision zone, Yeah. This is the thing I find fascinating. Yeah, it's, uh, again, it's one of those things that's kind of simple in theory, but complicated in practice because with drivers, no two drivers are the same. So you can create a set of rules that's based on a particular driver, but the next driver through the intersection might not behave the same way.

And generally, you know, you're assuming that every driver is following, the rules, which most of them don't. And you're assuming that they're all paying attention, which a lot of them aren't. And you're also assuming that they're being considerate of others, which they're also not. So, yeah, it's complicated. You know, there was this document that you drew my attention to, which is pretty kind of a famous study of the length of the amber signal and the importance of it being variable.

The problem of the amber signal light in traffic flow. General Motors, November 1959. Can criteria presently employed in setting the duration of the amber signal light at intersections lead to a situation where in a motorist, driving along a road within the legal speed limit, finds himself when the green signal turns to amber in the predicament of being too close to the intersection to stop safely and comfortably? and yet too far from it to pass through

before the signal changes to red without exceeding the speed limit. What I found interesting about that paper is it was pretty heavy on mathematics. The foregoing discussion is illustrated in figure 7, where each of the two shaded zones precludes one of the two alternatives, of stopping or going through the intersection.

Thus, a car at a distance from the intersection, smaller than XC, cannot stop safely, whereas a car at a distance greater than XO cannot go through the intersection without accelerating before the light turns red. Back then, maybe the authors were making a certain assumption that you could mathematically determine sort of the ideal location of an indecision zone, but maybe the behaviors

weren't completely taken into consideration in 1959. When XO is less than X, the driver is in trouble if he finds himself in the region XO, less than X, less than X, C, which in the sequel will be referred to as the Dilemma Zone. And I'm wondering, like, 65 years on, that idea of the dilemma zone and how it works, I mean, have you got a sense of how that may have evolved since the, this was kind of studied in depth? Yeah, so one thing is perception reaction time is part of the calculation that you use that determine the amber. And what that is, is the time that a driver needs

to become aware that the light has changed. So the standard that's used is one second or in rural areas with higher speed, you might use 1.8 seconds. Basically, if you're in a rural area, you may be not paying as close attention to the traffic signals. It takes that a little bit longer to realize. Now, some people will say, well, that might even be higher. And again, it really depends on the driver.

So you think if you have drivers from ages 16 to 90, a 16-year-old reaction time and a 90-year-old reaction time aren't going to be the same. Because another thing that comes up is, well, why not have countdowns for traffic signals like you do for pedestrians? and you could. It's, again, if you think for every traffic signal, you then now have to add a countdown. It's more infrastructure to maintain. And the more you put out there, the more risk there is of something failing.

So there's a, I don't know what it is, but I'm sure there's a sweet spot somewhere where you put enough tech into an intersection that makes it really effective, but you don't put so much tech into it that you create all these new failure points either. Yeah, yeah, I actually was noticing, I do this anyway, and I think probably a lot of drivers do.

They see the countdown for the pedestrian lane, pedestrian crossing, and they can co-relate that to the traffic light. It can, but it's not... But it's not always instantaneous. No, they're separate things. It's a bad habit for drivers to use pedestrian signals as a countdown for the green, yellow, and red indications. Really, when you're driving,

you shouldn't even be looking at the pedestrian signals. just be focused on what your signal is that you're approaching to. Okay, so now that's a pro tip that I can use, because I've been sort of cheating and looking at that. No, there are some that it will line up, but it's not guaranteed. So there's certain situations where, yeah, it's... Like if there's no pedestrian waiting to cross, it might just flip back to walk or... Yeah, you might start to break, but you've got a green light ahead of you.

So that's a good example of why you shouldn't look at the... You get rear-ended. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't use the countdowns. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. When you talk about tech at the intersections, there's what I see, you know, the light standards and the signals and some little doodads on top of the... But I don't, there's probably a lot of tech here that you see that I don't. Yeah. So there's different types of detection. A lot of detection is done still. by just their wires embedded in the road that will pick up when a vehicle's on top of them is just through the essentially the interference on the wire on the loop it can tell when there's a

vehicle above it and so that's the way most detection's done now it's moving towards smart detection or this non-intrusive and essentially it's using radar camera for sensing stuff Now, there's good things and bad things. This is, again, one of those things where you're trying to make it smarter, but at the same time you're making it smarter, you're introducing more options for it to fail and more fail points. But this seems to be a trend in many different fields of human endeavor, this complicating of things, like making things smart.

But I think there's this kind of countervailing pressure where you're actually making things more complicated. Yeah, and the thing I always find, mind is you're trying to make things smarter because you're assuming the people are getting stupider. That's, you know, that's a very brief take on that scenario. But I think a lot of it comes down to that. And this is more of just a personal thing for myself. I think rather than trying to make tech smarter and allow people to not think as much, I think the focus should be shifted towards holding people more accountable for their actions.

especially when it comes to driving. The global market for smart tech in cars and on roads, already about $100 billion U.S. dollars, will be worth more than $700 billion by 2030, according to Bloomberg intelligence. That enthusiasm is fueled in part by estimates of lower accident rates and more efficient traffic flows. But, of course, it's more complicated than that.

How about this study published in the journal Nature in 2025? It carries the headline, Drivers of partially automated vehicles are blamed for crashes that they cannot reasonably avoid. The upshot? A driver using autonomous functions in their car cannot regain control quickly enough in an emergency to avoid an accident. Public opinion, as measured by the study, tends to blame the driver, not the vehicle or the manufacturer, even in cases where the technology fails. This is what the study's authors call a, quote, culpability gap, unquote.

You know, there's the end scenario of that where you remove the human element from driving altogether, and it's just driverless cars, but realistically, I don't think that's ever going to happen. You're always going to have people that aren't connected to the system within your next. network and you build your network assuming that everything's connected well what happens when you introduce something that's not connected how is it dealt with you know i'm sure there's tech solutions for that somehow but i don't like an opt out button or something weird like yeah but no this this raises the i think a philosophical question for me though which is um and it's related to the yellow signal because we're providing that when you when you provide that that yellow signal

you're you're there's a there's a piece there's a piece of wording in and I wrote it down here. It is our hope that in pointing out the existence and nature of the Amber Signal Light problem, we may stimulate others to pursue it further and make certain that the driver is confronted with a solvable decision problem. Oh, yes, the solvable decision problem.

Solvable decision problem is how the GM folks who did the 1959. paper described what, what they want to provide a driver with, which essentially means they want to make it possible for you as an autonomous human being to make a decision. And it gives you the reasonable circumstances to make a decision. But a lot of the technical stuff that we're seeing, I would argue even maybe a red light camera is taking away some of that freedom to actually take, to do that decision. point as a human being?

I am on the side of drivers need to be paying attention and we don't need to keep giving more tech to try and control what drivers are doing. We really need to be pushing driver education. Now it's a lot harder to do that, especially when you're looking for a solution that you want to say, look, we solve this problem.

So it's easier to say, okay, we have this new technology that's going to solve this issue we're having versus admitting the humans are flawed and complicated, and we're going to do our best to educate them and make them more responsible drivers. It just doesn't have the same sort of glamorous rolling out the carpet as it does for a new tech system or something like that. From the corner of Brock and Taunton in Whitby, Ontario, Travis Stalking, senior traffic analyst for Jerm region. Standing beside him, Ideas producer Sean Foley.

And listening to us, Ideas on CBC Radio and wherever you get your podcast, is you. I'm Nala Ayad. This podcast is brought you by Wise. international people using money around the globe. With Wise, you can send, spend, and receive up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Plus, Wise won't add hidden fees to your transfer. Whether you're buying souvenirs with pesos in Puerto Vallarta or sending euros to a loved one in Paris, you know you're getting a fair exchange rate with no extra markups.

Be smart. Join the 15 million customers who choose Wise. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. Tise and Cs apply. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you've got to know,

and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out, This is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. So, Sean, when I saw your story, script in my email, I immediately remembered the conversation we had back in around this time in 2024 when we did the New Year's show, New Year's Levee Show. Yes, yes, we did. And it's taken a little while. But here we are. We're getting it done under the wire in 2025. And as I was getting down

to business and going through my gathered materials, I found an email message from a listener that was sent to me just after the Levy aired. And it read, please give my contact information to Sean. I have some comments regarding an automated red light ticket I got in December 2023 at Georgia and Cardero in Vancouver. Thank you, Ron Usher, Parksville, BC. So a fellow lawbreaker. Yeah. Yeah, a fellow badass.

Am I allowed to say badass? Yes, you are. This is ideas. Why not? The ideas of badassery. So naturally, two peas in a pod, you call. I called him up. I called him up.

Hello. Hi, is that Ron? It is. Hi, Ron. It's Sean Foley phoning from CBC Radio. How you doing? Okay. I was actually just laying down for a minute, but we might as well talk now.

Okay, well, listen, I'll try not to keep you too long. Now, I really didn't know what to expect, given my own unpleasant experience with a red light camera and the human tendency, which I share, to complain in these kinds of circumstances. I wondered if Ron Usher was going to deliver some sort of screed. Anyway, here we are. Thanks for a reminder about my red light ticket from a couple of years ago. Yeah, I hope I didn't remind you of something that brings back bad memories.

Well, it wasn't bad at Paul. It was intriguing to look at it. It frankly provoked more of a curiosity in me. You know, I've been driving for 60 plus years, and I think I have an impeccable driving record. And as I looked into the details of the camera, the intersection, is what the law is in the Motor Vehicle Act. And I would just recall I actually spend some summer during law school doing traffic duty in a small RCMP detachment. And you appreciate the distinction between a machine decision compared to what decision you make real time as you're driving. What the camera doesn't catch is quite a lot of the condition.

So I paid the ticket. I didn't think it was worth fussing over because there's no question. A camera shows my car in the intersection under a red light. That was hardly a screed. It sounds like an utterly civilized response. Yeah, yeah, it was refreshing. Perhaps because I think, you know, we're used to hearing a lot of outrage these days. It just seems like a natural reaction to things like this.

Ron's a retired lawyer who lived in Vancouver for 40 years and now lives on Vancouver Island. It was an intersection. I've been through many, many times, quite regularly. So I was certainly very familiar. And it's a very complicated intersection. There's two lights within just a 20 yards. each other. There's this tiny block and so where you're coping with two lights

it's a place where the lane a number of lanes you can use changes throughout the day. These people are impatiently coming down Georgia Street. It's kind of an odd turn left there onto West Hastings. So it's a complicated intersection

I was very familiar with. And so this is probably a bad analogy but it's kind of like the camera is like a bad AI. So it's a machine-based decision that is completely devoid of the more global conditions at the time. And I don't remember anything particular about the day other than I approached that intersection, always knowing it was weird.

Right. And obviously I made a in-the-moment while driving judgment call. The camera doesn't agree with that. I'm not so sure that a human policeman observing the actual situation. would have come to the same decision. One way I think of it, it's the impulsive and nearly

instant price of error decision you have to make. And what I'm very aware of is road surface conditions in skidding. I'm aware of the tendency of Vancouver drivers to tailgate. And so

the price of air at that moment as I'm looking forward and I see, it seems okay I can do this but there's people on my ass and the price of the error there and I've been re-rendered a couple times in Vancouver

it's kind of how I decided to pay the ticket it's like well I'll pay the ticket that's the price of error here but it's way less of a price than some significant accident on a busy street so I am

content based of my experience and the results there was no accident so whatever it's just a it's this machine decisions versus human decisions yeah and the machine decision is very automatic it's black and white i don't know what discretion they advise with those if somebody reviews those things that exercise their discretion or is it just that computer spits it out there's the letter of law that i was amazed to see where i looked up the law, the letter of the law, specifically tax about judgment. There's a section of red lights, green lights, and yellow lights.

The yellow light section has a very specific thing in about, if safe, okay? Yes. If possible, okay? And that sort of discretionary human decision language is not in the red light and the green light sections. When a yellow light alone is exhibited at an intersection, by a traffic control signal, following the exhibition of a green light, the driver of a vehicle approaching the intersection and facing the yellow light must cause it to stop before entering

the marked crosswalk on the near side of the intersection, or if there is no marked crosswalk before entering the intersection, unless the stop cannot be made in safety. Motor Vehicle Act, Province of British Columbia, Section 128, 1A. and so that to me says there is an awareness of necessity you make a call every yellow light involves a very complicated very quick decision there's all sorts of clues you can get from the environment about how stale a grain light is how old the red light is but again you can't just count these things because they vary enormously just on the drive from the night out of Parksville, there were a couple seconds different in the length of yellow lights. And I drove a motorcycle for years, and there's nothing like driving

a motorcycle to get you very conscious of road conditions. So, I think I've got some peculiar things about my past. Motorcycle riding, a cop experience, school experience that made me pretty aware of both

problematic things with driving, and I taught my three kids how to drive. you know yeah frankly i really appreciated those lessons learned and giving out tickets in sea shelt and observing the results of accidents and my lost cruel experience hanging out in traffic court in vancouver for a couple weeks yeah yeah uh did you ever have to give out a red light infraction or something like that oh i sure did and i'm very pleased to say that that the entire summer of giving tickets out on the Sunshine Coast. I've never had one challenged.

Huh. Well, very good. Very good. You're a principled man, it sounds like. Well, I, you know, it got me this far. So that's Ron Usher. He's a retired lawyer, concerned citizen, and an ideas listener from his home near Nanaimo, BC. So given what you and Ron talked about, I have to ask about your own red light infraction. Oh, yeah. You mentioned earlier that you were curious about what's happening in your head as you're approaching the intersection and the green turns to yellow. Do you know now what does happen? Well, I've probably thought or overthought about that the most.

And not just what was I thinking, but, you know, how do I decide something so important so quickly? And, of course, it's happening to me many times a day. And I found a philosopher named Alfred Mealy, who has done a lot of research on decision-making and free will, not just on the outside of us, but on the inside. His latest book is called Free Will, an opinionated guide, and he's at Florida State University in Tallahassee. So I've been in Tallahassee now for 25 years, and I have a sense of which lights stay yellow longer

and which stay yellow is shorter. And so for me, it's not really a matter of decision-making, at least not very often. I just have these habits, and they're pretty good, and I've never had any trouble as a result. But yeah, every once in a while, I think, gee, should I go for it or stop? And I check the rearview mirror. And if nobody's going to crash into me, if I stop, I usually stop.

But every once in a while I'll go for it. And these are really snap decisions. And I think of decisions as little mental actions. They're all in your head. And then they drive behavior. And then, you know, we wonder things like, well, should people be blamed? for these snap decisions or find in your case? I don't know.

You know, one argument is, well, if you had better habits, you would have done the right thing. And that was a question that did go through my mind. Is there something wrong with me? Or did I take this one too lightly or I don't know. There was something about that particular experience that got me thinking about how I even look at these, these occasions, these yellow light occasions, because I think most of the time

I would tend to see them as an interruption in my preferred flow. So I think of decisions as reactions to uncertainty about what to do. So if you're not uncertain about what to do, you have nothing to decide. You can just let habit, you know, drive your behavior. So it seems like what happened for you is that now you were uncertain about what to do, and that gave you the opportunity to make up your mind from time to time about what to do. I don't know, maybe that's a good thing for a while, but I think the better thing is just to have the best habits you can have. Then you don't

have to think about what to do. And then you can, you know, just be thinking about whatever you're thinking about and count on your habits to guide you. I know when I first started driving, I just had to pay attention to everything I did. And that was draining. So it was nice to get the habits in place. Yeah, so I think one of the things I've struggled with over time is forming, I mean, I know I have habits, but I don't know how reliable my habits are. I think the thing for me, though, is that the experience brought my attention to something that that I would never otherwise really have thought much about. I guess I'm pushing back a little bit on the habit thing.

So even if I'm a guy who doesn't have very good habits or my truck is a mess or, you know, whatever, if I can bring attention to those moments, is there a difference there? Yeah, I see. Yeah, that's interesting. There are neuroscience studies in the ballpark of this kind of thing. I mean, I've done a lot of work on neuroscience and free,

will. So years ago, at the National Institutes of Health, I gave a lecture on free will in neuroscience, and then I was a subject in a neuroscience experiment. And what I was supposed to do is to flex my wrist whenever I felt like it, basically. And I was watching a really fast clock. It made a complete revolution in about two and a half seconds. And what I was supposed to do was flex whenever I want and then be watching the clock, and then after I flexed, I would report when I first became conscious of my intention or a decision or whatever, wish or will, to flex. And I wanted to be a naive subject, so my thought was, well, I'll just sit there and I'll watch that clock, and maybe urges will pop up, and then I'll flex in response to them.

but nothing happened and I wondered how do subjects do this and what am I going to do and what I decided to do was to say now silently to myself and treat that as an expression of a decision and then yeah things look very different now when you're being so mindful about what you're doing in this tiny domain of finger flexes because if I didn't have to report anything, I would just, you know, flex away and not pay much attention. But having to report brought consciousness into focus on a certain thing. And I think that's what you're talking about, that kind of thing. And you know what? I mean, that neuroscience line of experimentation was supposed to show that we don't have free will because we make our decisions unconsciously

and don't become conscious of them until later on, which I've disputed. But it was fun to do it. I don't know, though. I mean, is it a good idea to spend mental energy on things that could be driven quite nicely by habits and then use that mental energy to do other things? I sort of think so. So I love that question, and I found that applying those, applying that energy, that mental energy to the yellow light decision has actually opened up the moment, the pause moment, and I think there have been some fruits from that with the amount of other stimuli that we get now. that's almost

feels like a kind of a nice bit of space to exist in because I think if my habits were just carrying me through that I'd probably just keep thinking about whatever thing is grinding me up and keep getting me worried

you know no I see I see yeah that that's interesting too so that gives us a new sphere in which to think about things I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease almost four years ago now. And so I can't rely on normal walking habits because I'm not

normal anymore. I used to do all the right stuff automatically. Now I can't. And so I have to guide my steps very, very consciously. And I guess if I were to spend more time reflecting on that, I might get to understand myself better, my Parkinson's better, you know, understand it better. I don't know. It sounds like it's something I should try. Parkinson's, at least in my case, is sort of like very gradually forgetting how to walk. So when you're a baby, you don't walk, and then you learn, and you're off balance at first, and then you can walk relatively well after a while, and I'm just going in the reverse direction. My balance is screwed up. I need to use a cane.

I try not to let it bother me much but I'm also maybe in a position to learn something from it too so maybe I'm on board with what you're talking about well that's I mean that's a very powerful way to reflect on it so thank you for sharing that you've done so much work on free will what about free will in situations where we're talking about that

so the decision point around a yellow light really can become a let's say a life and death matter if I take it to the nth degree. Does anything come up for you around free will and that reality? Yeah, it does. We have a problem

here in Tallahassee of bike riders, usually from Europe who are used to riding bikes safely on roads in Europe and here they can easily be run over. One of my German grad students was killed

in a car accident. He was riding his bike just a few months ago. And I think it's because drivers aren't thinking enough in advance about how they should behave given that we have these bike riders on the roads.

Yeah, so free will enters in there. Right. It's a matter of will before you begin? I think so, yeah. We need to prepare ourselves for what we're going to do and, you know, take things seriously, be more mindful of what's going on on the roads. In this kid's case, the guy ran a stop sign

and just bowled right over him. In the philosophical literature on decision-making, there are some people who say decisions are not mental actions. They're just products of what's going on in the environment and maybe a bit of thinking. So you don't actually perform an action of deciding to do something. The decision kind of pops up. So what would be happening for me if that's the case

and I'm approaching an intersection and the light turns yellow? Yeah, then what would be going on is these mechanisms in your head are generating this result, which is something like an intention to speed up or an intention to slow down and stop. and you don't really have direct control over it. That's how they're thinking about it. Just like you don't have direct control over what you believe.

You look out and see the sun is shining, and you believe that it's shining. Yeah, I find it very implausible, and there isn't great scientific evidence for that kind of view, but it's a view that's out there, and it's a view that would make you worry about free will, too. So if your decisions aren't actions, if they just pop up, how can you be blamed for them or deserve credit? Is it possible that there are two different forms of decision, two or more different forms of decision making that could be going on? Like one for the more split second kind of thing and one for some of the other stuff that we have to make decisions on? Yeah, I think so. call them both decisions if we want to. So when we do these routine things, like every day

when I come to work, I walk up the stairs to my office door and I pull out my key and unlock the door. That's an intentional action, you know, unlocking the door. So I think I have an intention to do it. But I never have to decide what to do when I get to my office door because it's just part of the routine. Unlock it. Now, if there were a fight in my office and I could hear it, you know, I'd be uncertain about what to do and I'd think about it and make a decision. So I think that second thing is a mental action. It's resolving uncertainty by deciding what to do. And the first thing, the intention popping up, isn't a mental action. We can call that a decision if we want. I wouldn't, but we could. And then we'd have these,

active decisions and non-active decisions. And the active ones are way more interesting, and they seem to be the ones for which we deserve credit or blame, and the ones that we make freely, whereas the other things are these popping up things. And the popping up is associated with habit, so it's my habit to unlock my door when I get there. And that's why I don't need to think about what to do. And your yellow light experience, you know, raises questions about your decision-making. And maybe questions about your habits, too. And, you know, and then what you should do about it. Yeah, so I couldn't necessarily defend myself by saying,

why should I be responsible for paying a fine? Because it wasn't an active decision that I made. It was just, I just didn't stop. That was how it rolled out. That would be a really, like, if that was a plausible defense, that would make traffic court, I think, pretty entertaining or even disturbing. Yeah, imagine a defense in court that says, oh, my brain made me do it.

You know, you can't blame me. It's just my brain. Yeah, that wouldn't work in the real world. And that's kind of scary because I don't know what was going on when I, did what I did. Like, I'm not a bad guy, and I don't love running red lights, and I don't even like speeding. It's a moment where I'm not maybe as fully connected to my brain

as I think I am all the time, or as I am all the time. And, you know, I guess that's the nature of mistakes. Oh, we can have our guesses about why. Like, in your case, it sounds like tiredness was part of what was going on. So it looks like, you know, a case of negligence. really. You weren't deciding to speed up or deciding to run a red light. You just maybe weren't paying enough attention to when it turned yellow. It's not then that you were having direct control over what you did. You were sort of passive with respect to it. But then

if there's going to be blame, it's going to be, yeah, but you should have been more attentive, even if you were tired. And, you know, that makes sense. Well, this has given me a lot to think about Al, and I really appreciate, especially around maybe developing better habits in certain circumstances. It's a bit daunting for me. Oh, well. Yeah, I don't want to be depressing at all, but, you know, I work on myself and try to develop better habits. Thanks so much, Al, and take care. Okay. Thank you. I enjoyed it. So I did stage tech before and with lights, stage management, all that kind of stuff. And I started to see infrastructure in general as being the backstage of human life.

Now, it's not as exciting per se, and people get a lot more mad about it than they do at the theater. But there is this element of if you've done it to the best of your ability, and if you've done it so well, no one knows you're doing it. And that's kind of the end goal, that everything just works. And no one thinks about it. Now, it's hard at a traffic signal because at some point you've got to stop people and whenever you stop someone, they start thinking.

So it's tough to take full ownership of something where you ultimately don't get to choose how people are going to use it. The way I always see traffic signals is that they're guidance, not guarantees. and I feel like there can become this philosophy of the traffic signal controls everything and in some ways it does control it like you do you have to follow it but we can't guarantee that people are going to follow the traffic signals I love the idea that you're providing guidance at each of these intersections as best you can but then you you have to if you want to be able to not go insane I guess in your job you have to

able to let go of whether people take that guidance. I mean, do you think people, because I never looked at it this way until I got, until I got on the wrong side of a red light camera, which I believe was a perceptual problem on my part. I was too tired. I thought the yellow light was like this shortest yellow light I've ever gone through in my life. But when the, when the photograph of my vehicle came with the stats, the numbers, it just, that didn't bear out. It was a 3.8 second yellow light in the middle of like a deserted intersection like I was doing like 50 so I was just like I think I was just on screensaver or something like that yeah and again in terms of time you signals and timing of yellow lights you get into people's perception of time now any person knows

that they've had an hour that lasted a year and they've had an hour that lasted one second so now you take one second well one second sometimes feels like 30 seconds or you know one minute can feel like an hour, but that's because we're perceiving it, depending on how we're feeling that day, yet the traffic signal is timed by a clock with no emotion. So then when you're arguing about, well, it took this long and it did that long, well, did it really, did you actually time it? Or are you having a day where time's going slow or time's going fast and it's changing how you're perceiving that time? Yeah, I think that's where my defense fell apart. My, that was the shortest yellow light in history defense.

Yeah, it's easy. I mean, I do it all the time driving. I get stopped at a red light and I'm mad about how long the red light is, even though I know why the red light is that long and that it actually isn't 10 minutes, it's 40 seconds. But on that day, it felt like I sat there for 10 minutes. It's because we're human and we do these things and we're not, you know, we're still trying to figure it out.

And, uh, and that's a good thing. thing we shouldn't we shouldn't vilify human failure and I think sometimes that's what starts to happen and you know it is it's scary that we are vulnerable and so we want to create these solutions but ultimately we just have to be comfortable with being vulnerable and take more agency of ourselves and more responsibility when we're out there and moving around. I will say just by way of wrapping up that I love that you're the guy who knows why these signals do what they do, and you're sitting at a red light, just blowing smoke out of your ears.

Yeah, yeah, without failure, you know. Like, you can't sit there and be like, like, say you're sitting with your spouse and you're like, and she's concerned because she's got to get somewhere, you can say, well, honey, the thing is, this is just another, it's another 17 seconds. It's just because, you know. That's, I don't, yeah, count. You know, you get fresh to count.

You'll realize it's not, and don't count fast, count normal. And that's, yeah. Count Mississippi, so whatever. You know, you'll realize it normally isn't that long. Yeah. And maybe look at, I don't know, see if there's some birds on the wire or whatever. Well, just take a few breaths. A lot of people could stand to take a few more breaths while they're driving.

Now, I know that might get a lot of people mad, but I don't know. It's easy to say hard to do it. do even for myself included yeah for sure for sure well known that's what that's what i like about you travis you're not preaching from on high you know what it's like in the trenches yeah no it's well it's about being honest right and that's people will take that personally and it's not meant to be yeah yeah all right well it's nothing personal yeah don't take traffic signals personally and that's a lot of people do thank you so much Travis for this oh yeah happy to it's it's fun to discuss and And, yeah, it's a complicated situation that everyone wants a simple solution for,

and really it just isn't there. Because the more you dig into it with all the variables, the more complicated it gets. So, yeah, you could always keep tweaking it, keep tweaking it, keep tweaking it. But at what point do we just have to accept that it's never going to be perfect and learn how to live with that? You've been listening to Indecision Zone, the Yellow Light and you. Featuring Travis Stalking, Senior Traffic Analyst for Durham Region in Ontario, Alfred Mealy, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University,

and retired BC lawyer and ideas listener, Ron Usher. Readings by Nahid Mustafa. She did a great job. technical readings. It was produced by me, Sean Foley. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production by Emily Kiervezio and Sam McNulty. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly. And you are Nala Ayyad. Indeed. Oh, was that okay? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Okay, that was fun. Yeah, that was great. Perfect night for it, too. Yeah, really nice. And I don't know if I was yelling. Was that yelling to you? Okay, because I had these cranked up so I could hear what, hear it was going on around us. This is good.

For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.com. podcasts.