Increasing MPG

Exactly. The point is to pay attention to what's going on around you and use it to your advantage.

There was a guy on a local Internet forum who complained about one of our city streets, who swore up and down that it didn't have synchronized lights and that he'd been driving it for 30 years so he should know. But it does have synchronized lights, has had them for decades, which everyone else on the forum let him know in no uncertain terms.

If you commute to work via the same route every day then you can take great advantage of whatever patterns your local streets happen to have. And even if you're driving somewhere that's unfamiliar, simply noticing what the lights and traffic are doing a few blocks down the road can work to your advantage. You miss a lot of opportunities if you're fixated on just the cars that are closest to you. They're important, of course, but there's a lot of other stuff going on out there too.

 

Well, before around 6:20am here, they are not timed. If I leave 5 mins later for work I have counted 45 second longer (same lights in same direction) as was 5 mins earlier with slightly less traffic flow. It's done on purpose and it's annoying.

 

Of course the lights can only be timed in one direction, and in most cities the timing for the morning rush hour is set differently than for the evening rush hour so as to best accommodate the prevailing flow of traffic. So it becomes a matter of timing as to when the lighting plans flip over.

The street I referred to in my previous post happens to be a one-way street, so it's always timed the same way. But there are other streets whose timing changes through the day, much the same as the counterflow lanes on our local bridges do.