Hundreds of new laws approved at this year's General Assembly session take effect today. One that is garnering a lot of attention involves traffic lights. The new law allows bicyclists and motorcycle riders to proceed through a red light, assuming it's safe to do so, if the light hasn't changed in two minutes.
The legislation grew out of a problem that two wheel vehicles have with traffic light sensors. I heard a reporter on WVEC-TV say today that bikes, motorcycles and mopeds aren't heavy enough for the sensors to detect and change the red light to green. That's not quite accurate. The sensors aren't detecting weight; they're detecting electrical current.
The grooves in the road at traffic lights mark where a loop of insulated conductive wire is embedded in the road. When an object containing iron or steel comes near the loop, an electrical current is generated, and that's what signals the traffic light that a vehicle is waiting at the red light. Bikes and motorcycles just don't have enough metal for the system to work sometimes.
Which brings me to this question: what was my family's 1986 Renault Encore made of? Although in many respects it barely qualified as a car, it was still a four-wheeled hunk of metal. And yet there was a traffic light in Lynchburg that refused to change when I drove the Renault to work at WLVA-AM 25 years ago. The light had no problem detecting the family Volkswagen...it was only the Renault it refused to recognize.
As Dad once wrote, "My Renault won't gault in the snault." The Renault couldn't make the traffic light gault, either.
Links:
A list of new Virginia laws
Wikipedia's entry on conductive loops
Wikipedia's entry on the much maligned Renault Alliance/Encore.
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