Change traffic lights with your credit card
More Sense
Toll roads increasingly issue cards that send out a personal code, so
that cars can pass through toll gates without having to stop to pay
money. This technology has a number of advantages, such as allowing a
much faster flow-through of traffic, requiring less people to operate
the toll gates and constituting less hassles for drivers in terms of
having their coins ready, etc. This same technology could be used to
change the color of trafic lights. Imagine clicking on a pre-paid card
to change the traffic light from red to green.
Right now, toll roads are funded on a user-pays basis, typically with
toll gates at both ends of a long stretch of road. If the toll road had
too many intersections, too many toll gates would have to be
positioned, making the whole concept too expensive.
Paying-to-change-traffic-lights could add a new dimension here, perhaps
allowing the poor to use toll roads that would otherwise be too
expensive for them. It would allow roads to be (partly) funded without
the need for toll gates at each intersection, perhaps without any toll
gates at all. The poor could thus continue to use roads for free, be it
with an added inconvenience that they may have to wait longer before
traffic lights. But if there happens to be someone behind them who is
willing to pay, they may also get through more quickly than before.
It's just a different way of funding roads and it seems more efficient.
In some ways, it's also more equitable. But the biggest argument in
favor is that it is more in line what we we want.