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SALT LAKE CITY — Would you like to know precisely when a red traffic light will turn green? A new app being tested in Utah is designed to tell drivers how long they have before the light changes color.
When the light turns red, some motorists start fiddling around with things in the car, like the radio or the car seat. The app, called Enlighten, claims to predict when the light will change, supposedly so drivers can stop fiddling and get ready to drive again.
Enlighten uses a phone's GPS. If the app determines a vehicle is stopped, it uses the location to find out if the car is at a red light and launches a visual countdown.
Five seconds before the red light turns green, it chimes, telling the motorist to get ready to drive.
A hatred of red lights compelled Matt Ginsberg to create Enlighten.
“Sometimes you’ll be at a long light and you would think, is this broken? Am I going to have to run it, or die of hunger?” he said.
Ginsberg's app doesn't talk with the traffic signals directly to make its predictions. Instead, it crunches the numbers on real-time traffic data provided by Utah traffic engineers and other agencies.
“Before we could go live in Salt Lake City, we collected data from the city for a month and we used that data to predict, this is how long this light tends to be,” Ginsberg said.
“Between that and the statistics, we’ve built a reasonably accurate model of how long the light will stay red,” he added.
Ginsberg said it's not just about taking away red-light stress. He said it improves safety by bringing the attention of drivers back to driving just before the light changes.
“You no longer have the situation where you are at a red light and you’re distracted in some way. It can be from tuning a radio to (shaving) at red lights. The light changes, the guy behind you honks and you just dart out into the intersection. That shouldn’t happen any more,” he said.
Ginsberg argued when cars dart out like that, they’re much more likely to hit another car or a pedestrian because drivers are not paying as much attention as they would if they were ready for the light to change.
The app itself shouldn't be a distraction. It doesn't provide any information while a car is in motion.
“The Enlighten app does nothing unless you’re stationary, so you’ve got to stop,” Ginsberg explained.
He said he's negotiating with automakers to roll out the app in dashboards.
“Maybe 2016-2017 model year, something like that,” he said.
Driving around Salt Lake, KSL found Enlighten to be fairly spot-on. It was a couple of seconds off on a few lights. It wouldn't even try to predict the red light times for traffic signals shared with TRAX lines. Ginsberg said that will be the case until his company makes arrangements with cities over light-rail systems.
