A new survey by Thrifty Car & Van Rental has found that 38% of drivers rarely stop at amber lights while 16% treat amber traffic lights as if they were green – and drive straight through with no intention of trying to stop.

A massive 80% of those surveyed admitted that they did sometimes try to run amber lights, despite the fact that failure to stop at an amber light is an offence, unless it is unsafe to do so. According to Thrifty’s survey, the worst offenders are in Chelmsford, followed by Leeds, Coventry, Liverpool and Brighton.

This survey reminds me of something I was once told in a presentation by a traffic police officer. You may have noticed that not all amber lights are the same length – I often notice that on motorway roundabouts, the amber period is much shorter than at town centre lights, for example.

Apparently, amber periods have been lengthened over the years to try and improve safety. Unfortunately, this seems to have had the side effect of encouraging people to drive through amber lights because there is such a long pause before the lights go to red.

Anyone who has driven on the continent will have noticed that in most European countries, traffic lights often go from green to red almost instantly, with minimal amber periods. This makes it almost impossible to run an amber light – you will almost certainly end up driving through the red light, instead. This does seem a good idea to me, as does another continental idea, that of flashing amber lights in all directions at quiet times.

This is an idea the Department for Transport has been looking into, although so far has not decided to adopt. What happens is that at quiet times, all the traffic lights at a junction will flash amber, warning drivers that they can proceed but must take care to ensure that nothing is coming the other way. This is similar to what happens when a set of traffic lights stops working in the UK – people still manage to get across the junction – often faster than usual, in my experience. The only time that traffic lights really seem to help is at very busy junctions, where gridlock would result without them.