A letter to the London Free Press, published January 28, 2025
If you’ve spent any amount of time driving around London, you’ve likely been stuck behind a driver in the left-turn lane who fails to take advantage of an advanced green in an expedient manner.
It can be infuriating. For this reason, I suggest the city removes advanced greens and swaps them out for yellow lights.
As you are likely aware, London drivers have a common tendency, when approaching a stale green that turns to yellow to hammer the gas pedal and accelerate aggressively through the intersection, precisely the behaviour they should exhibit for an advance green. Yellow lights in place of advanced greens would therefore ensure a better flow of left-turning traffic.
Conversely, since the average Londoner tends to panic and freeze at the site of an advance green light, replacing our yellow lights with a green arrow would solicit a reaction of caution and restraint, causing drivers to slow and eventually brake as the light turned red, instead of driving through the intersection. These simple changes might allow us to improve road safety by taking into account London road users’ natural instincts.
Ben T. Johnson 