I have been wanting to post this for a while but just now got around to it. At the intersection of Riverside and Lemay, in Fort Collins, CO, there is a peculiar oddity. The left turn signals vertically mounted have a 4-segment light, with the green and yellow arrows combined into one. Such a configuration has been outlawed since I believe 1971, yet the installation looks somewhat new.
Are there any other signals like that one elsewhere in the United States?
Had to watch twice cause at first I thought you were talking about the overheads instead of the pole mount. Yeah this type of installation is not allowed...and there's no reason why a 5-section vertical head couldn't have been used.
Also odd that it's a near-side left mount, which seems fairly unusual for a left hand turn.
I suspect that the near side signal is because of the skewed intersection layout. If it were on the far left side, the signal would be too far away to be useful.
I think the outlawing is a lot more recent than 1971... I saw a similar sort of setup in a suburb of Kansas City in the late 90s.
Inline-4 signals are used in a countless amount of places throughout the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic. Here's (http://www.flickr.com/photos/iccdude/5992758802/in/set-72157625788140076) a fairly recent one in Sloatsburg, NY.
I am not sure that you get what I am talking about, PennDOTFan. The signal in your picture appears to be just a Red-Yellow-Green-Green Arrow, with no yellow arrow.
Quote from: Zmapper on May 13, 2012, 06:49:11 PM
I am not sure that you get what I am talking about, PennDOTFan. The signal in your picture appears to be just a Red-Yellow-Green-Green Arrow, with no yellow arrow.
The bottom section is a bi-modal section that goes from green arrow to yellow arrow, then to off. Isn't that what we're talking about?
You're right. It is interesting that new installations exist.
Quote from: Zmapper on May 13, 2012, 06:55:34 PM
You're right. It is interesting that new installations exist.
Yeah, I still wonder why they still install them, because it looks like it'd be difficult for someone who's color blind to see the green arrow change to yellow. There are still other states that still install these, including Maine, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.
It's absolutely still allowed out here. I guess they figure that left turns are less critical than through movements, since you're coming straight at the other traffic about to (i.e. the opposite direction) rather than at 90 degrees so everyone can see each other better. Consider this - a lot of signals out here didn't have yellow arrows - some old ones still don't - the green arrow just flashes off a few seconds before the other direction goes. So given that operation, yellow arrow has ended up being a low priority. Now, NJ for one (and NY for two) certainly has a lot of doghouse and other 5-head installations, but they do sometimes use 4-head still. Is the cost of an extra lens that great?
That one in Fort Collins was there when I lived there in the late '90s. It was incandescent so looks like it's survived all the incandescent to LED conversions. Zmapper is right on the skew of the intersection. I think it's the only one in town, not show why that intersection is the place it ended up.
I recall one on Main Street, Wheaton (IL), just south of downtown.
Here's a GMSV closeup shot: http://g.co/maps/xa9mg (http://g.co/maps/xa9mg)
They have them all over the place - I've seen the green/yellow combo 4-lights in Arizona and Montana thus far