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I found a link to stoplight concept of Damjan Stanković on dirty.ru. Designer offers to add sectors round the stop light so the drivers could see how soon they can move again and stop their engines thus saving gas and nature.

Damjan Stanković “Eko stoplight” concept

I like the idea and the contemplations but there are some problems with the product itself:

• the red light reduces — the less time left, the smaller the red light, the less chances you’ll notice it;
• uncertainty about the ending — the last sector is placed on the top, the stoplight are usually hung very high and the last sector is in the topmost position of the stoplight;
• different stoplights ave different time intervals, so we should vary the speed of the segments disappearing and that would confuse — people are concentrated on the road not on the patterns creation to understand stoplights, so this invention makes the simple object (as it has to be) more complicated;
• the old technology — LEDs are widely used nowadays to create stoplights instead of lamps behind colored glass as it is shown in the concept. LEDs are better because they are useful even when the sun is blinding. Furthermore it would be expensive to create such stoplights without LEDs.

Conveniet traffic light

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We start with enlarged red light. It is useful and convenient because it’s the only one sign that orders us to stop and wait while others are more appeasable ;) We’ll use LEDs with no options and change the round shape to square. As far as I remember the stoplights are square in Minsk and even if I am wrong, I am sure I’m not the one who came up with the idea of using the whole available are. LEDs allow to do it instead of old technology with lamp and glass where the corners would be dark anyway. Time left would be displayed right on the square with light, so we won’t distract from the light but also won’t still the area of the signal.

Convenient font

I sketched a pixel font that would look good on the traffic light concept I suggest. It is also made that way that it takes the occupies the smallest area preserving readability (one of the suggestions is stealing one “pixel” from some of the numbers).

1 and 7 would never be mixed up. Also there is a way to show time intervals more then 99 seconds. If the interval is longer then we can show minutes turning to seconds the minute before the lights change. For the roads closed due to some cortege there is infinity sign showing how much those free riding care about us standing in the jam.

More features

As far as LEDs are used there are a lot of ways to inform and control drivers. Examples including cyrillic localization are shown below.