Apologies for the terrible video quality, but I can't help posting a pet peeve of mine: the lack of standards for walk/don't walk signs at intersections. The countdown timers are great, but it's impossible to know at which point during the countdown the light will change to yellow.

This video is from the south edge of Logan Circle — an intersection I bike through every day. You can see that in one direction the light turns yellow when the countdown is at zero; in the other, the light turns yellow around "5" and is red at zero. This inconsistency seems dangerous.

Click To Play

Let's face it: if you're on a bike or in a car you'll occasionally find yourself trying to make a light. We can pretend that the stoplight should be the sole direction for vehicle operators, but that's a bit silly: the countdown timers are clearly an irresistible source of information that can be used to determine whether it's possible to get through an intersection safely. When they occasionally behave in unexpected ways, it's a genuine hazard.

I'm speaking from experience. Back in high school I was hit by a car while on my bike thanks to a combination of my own stupidity and a non-standard "don't walk" indicator. The overall dumbness of my teenage boy self was admittedly the driving factor. But that's hard to correct — it would've been a lot easier to properly program the signal so that the solid-red-hand had corresponded with the usual pause-at-yellow instead of green-means-go.