The Bad Drivers of Ontario Thread

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.8 and under is a reasonable time if you're sitting on the starting line focused on anticipating a light to change. On the road, with all the other stimuli, by the time your brain perceives a light has changed and you react to it and move your foot from gas to brake is a second and a half, on average under ideal conditions. Half the population is slower.

Driver Reaction Time

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3.5 seconds yellow duration is in the ballpark of what it should be for a road with a 60 km/h limit.

60 km/h = 16.7 metres per second
Time to stop at 0.5 g = 4.9 m/s^2 (moderately hard stop but not nearing limits of traction with tolerable tires on tolerable pavement or even wet pavement) is about 3.4 seconds. This is the physics not the reaction time, we'll get to that.
D = 0.5 * A * t^2 = 28.3 metres.
Add 1 second reaction time so another 16.7 metres = 45 metres.
If you choose to go through the light instead of stopping, you are not decelerating, so you cover the same distance faster - you'll cover the 45 metres in 2.7 seconds. There's 0.8 seconds of wiggle room for an even longer reaction time.

Redo the math at 3 metres per second because maybe it's slippery. Time is 5.55 seconds (this is a fairly gentle deceleration). Distance is 46.3 metres. Add a second of reaction time, total distance 63 metres. If you chose to blow through instead of stop, you cover that in 3.7 seconds, barely over the yellow duration, if you want to decelerate that gently then you'll need to react faster (in 0.8 seconds instead of 1.0) in order to not blow through the light. But still, 3.5 seconds is in the ballpark.

Redo the math because you're speeding, 80 km/h, but you can decelerate at 0.5 g. Speed is 22.22 metres per second. Time to stop is 4.53 seconds during which you cover 50.4 metres. Add a second of reaction time before slowing down, 72.6 metres total. If you opted to blow through the light, you cover that distance in 3.3 seconds. You are still okay. Not much wiggle room ... but you're speeding ... yet it's still okay. If it's slippery and you can't slow down that quickly then maybe you shouldn't be speeding. If your brakes don't work or your tires are crap and you're still speeding, that's on you.

For the duration of a yellow traffic signal, 3.5 seconds is about the right number - but not less.

All of this is presuming that the condition you are avoiding is "entering" the intersection against a red (and that's the thing prohibited in the HTA - you are allowed to be "in" the intersection against a red but you cannot "enter" it against a red. There is another time over and above this for a car that has already entered the intersection for that car to clear the intersection ... this is the time that it's red in all directions after the yellow has switched to red and before the green is given to a different direction.
 
Camry is getting some safety mods this spring

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s-l1600.jpg
 
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High Flya said:
Fake quad exhaust and diffuser = safety?
Click to expand...

No.. This is stock

CamryRearEnd3.jpg


I just added more lights so when you brake turn signal or four ways there are more than just the tail lights and tiny light behind the rear window
 
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Snow really brings out the timid (bad) drivers. I shouldn't really be shocked at the number of times that I saw someone doing 80+ in the slow lane of the 401, or 410, who saw snow in their lane, nailed the brakes down to 30 Kmh, then immediately moved to the #2 lane where people were doing 100+. What I should be surprised by is that I didn't see that cause any collisions. Miracles happen, apparently.
 
If it takes more than five kilometres to make your pass, then maybe you shouldn't be passing.
 
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