I like the idea of having the lights turn yellow first before green. Since I drive a manual here in America that would be so convenient for me to get my car in gear rather than rushing it the moment it turns from red to green.

i was curious about the traffic lights in london and couldn't believe i was able to find an entire video with explanations about it . thank you!

This is an amazing video. In a few decades, it will be priceless gem that gives a glimpse into the old old world of manually driven cars. 😀

Also when the first pelican crossings were introduced in the towns and cities in the UK in 1969 the name 'Pelican' was an acronym of 'PEdestrial LIght CONtrolled crossing'. These originally used sets of 1950s SGE traffic lights with the red man and green man pedestrian signals in a rectangular black steel box as back then the plastic 'Mellor' traffic lights which were supposed to be installed for pelican crossings were not introduced until 1972 onwards. The first pelican crossing to be installed in London in 1969 was located directly outside the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington.

Many years ago I lived near a GEC traffic automation depot which had a huge skip outside. One day I walked by and there was a set of 4 complete signals on the poles together with 2 Autoflex pedestrian controllers. With no tools I couldn't remove the controllers but I managed to get a 1950's traffic head with the swivel adjustments (which I foolishly sold to my mate at school to use for his disco!).

I grew up in Wimbledon in the early 1980s and back then we still had the old ATE/Plessey tin lights from the 1950s on their black & white banded poles which were fascinating to watch along with their old 'Wait' and 'Cross Now' pedestrian signals. I remember in 1982 when all these were replaced by the plastic 'Mellor' traffic lights with the red man and green man pedestrian signals. We also had the original 1970s pelican crossings in parts of the London Borough of Merton with the 'Mellor' traffic lights and their white sight boards and bleeping audio signal. Also in the 1980s in places like Marylebone, Fulham and Chelsea were the old 1940s SGE traffic lights - they were fascinating to look at with their individual red/amber/green lights at the top of a single pole.

Excellent video. The variety of UK traffic signals is awesome. The incandescent lamps look a lot better, with the afterglow. But with a rush to get everything converted to LED, you documented some great UK history. I noticed that the low-pressure sodium lamps had disappeared in the night video.

I believe the thing you call "camera" is actually a Microwave detector. It does as you say detect if there is a person there.

Temporary traffic lights are my favourite and I really love them

I'm from Lincoln, Lincolnshire and we have some traffic lights which follow the London specification. I love the look of them, they are far better than normal traffic lights

I love this guy's channel and I love traffic lights!

Very informative video! The traffic signals at 15:38 are made by Swarco and rebranded as SRL although SRL are a temporary traffic lights and signs provider but they are able to put their brand on it, kinda like with generic lift panels in a way With the pelican crossings that don’t flash, when they go blank they stay blank until all persons have left the crossing (by using another sensor like with the puffin) then the red man appears. Modern day Pelican crossings now do this as they realised this is a safer way of doing it as the green light for the traffic don’t come on until everyone is off the crossing TSEU was originally MicroSense and they merged with Traffic Signals UK before they became Telent. I wonder whether they are owned by the same people just with a new name because there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of old Telent traffic lights so I theorise that they are just renamed but don’t take my word for it as I cannot guarantee One more additional fact is that the reason many London traffic lights don’t have white trims on the outside is because as long as it is a 30mph road or less then you do not require white boarders so TFL don’t put on the white boarders unless it is a road above 30mph as it saves them additional costs.

The Belisha lamp in the museum was cool too. The NZ temporary traffic lights have a real estate sign type material on the outside surround. The phasing with Red/Yellow before Green is great. Pity NZ never adopted that. Those lens louvres are very cool. In Auckland there are some polarized glass lenses in use near Barry's point, North Shore. That Pelican flashing amber is very clever.

@3:38 Toucan is also a type of bird for anyone who didnt know 👍

The crossings similar to the pelican crossings but without the flashing amber phase and where the green man signal goes out for three seconds before the red man signal comes on (and the traffic lights show a red & amber phase instead of a flashing amber phase) are called 'Pedex' crossings.

I have seen one london speck coming off the coast road coming out of newcastle (the coast road is for going to newcastle)

This is my toddler son’s favourite video. If you’ve seen your viewing going up recently, it’s because he asks for ‘traffic lights’ every day!

In the US, the yellow signal is about 1 second longer than in the UK (before turning red). I can count 1-1000, 2-1000, 3-1000, 4 before the light turns red. On the UK I can only do 1-1000, 2-1000, 3

14:31 I miss when traffic lights do this. It brings me back to when I was young.

12:48 Those Special Hoods are also applied on the traffic lights in Japan and Somewhere in Canada.

I really love the countdown crossing lights and it should be the main ones in the uk 🇬🇧

in my country, most traffic lights have a seconds countdown in the main traffic light so we always know when the light change, some light count to 1 amd change, some count to 0 and change, some display one as 01 and some display one as 1

That Red and Yellow together thing before green. I thought it was exclusive of Buenos Aires City. I was in London some time ago and I don't remember seeing that.

A lot of traffic lights in Stoke-on-Trent are replaced with Telent 4Gs, but since I live in Cheshire, I tend to see quite a fair bit of Siemens Helios and Peek sets, with an extremely rare chance of finding Mellor styled sets. As a matter of fact, I saw a couple of Mellors at my time in Blackpool!

I like the modern design of the TSEU traffic lights but I hate how small they are compared to other lights which can make it bloody hard to see the lights from far away. There is a set of TSEU traffic lights puffin crossing by my college that have the same control box which is actually called a logic cabinet and the cabinet says TSEU Group Traffic Signals UK Microsense on the metal label. So your theory is correct. Infact I’ve seen that on multiple TSEU lights.

The traffic lights in London are my favourite

Some of those ones are incandescent meaning that they only have one bulb and a reflector inside them

The difference between Plessey and GEC is that GEC doesn't have the line between the red and green man whereas it does on Plessey's

I love the antique ones at 6:08

The crossings where there is no audible sound to indicate when it is safe for pedestrians to cross are usually where there is a central pedestrian refuge and the pedestrians cross one carriageway, then wait in the centre before crossing the other carriageway. This is so that someone who is visually impaired doesn't hear the sound of the crossing on the far carriageway and assume it is safe for them to cross the near carriageway.

The "fibre optic" you called , is probably a Fresnel lens. It's found in all CLS (central light source) LED aspects (for instance, the Swarco aspects at 2:00, the Siemens Helios CLS at 10:00, and the Peek Elite TLED 12V (marketed by SRL) at 15:30) . The real fibre-optic aspects used in the UK is a completely different thing.

7:45 2024 update: this junction with a mix of mellor and peek traffic lights has now been replaced with Telent LED lights with countdown timers on the pedestrian men

Traffic lights are my favorite

NZ has a similar school zone setup (I find that it's only active during the times of day where kids are going to school and leaving school, at least in NZ anyway!) but you'll find that the UK uses the imperial system (mph) to measure the car speed, unlike NZ which uses the metric system (km/h). So 20 mph in the UK is the equivalent to 40 km/h in NZ, for the school zone speed limit

8:13 the right arrow is there to allow traffic turning right, to turn right, if there is a lot of oncoming traffic

26:17 They were by Merry Hill but all got replaced with PEEK TLED

thank u for a good vid edcuational thank u

The 2:10 timer is very rare to see and as a Brit myself I’ve never seen them

8:18 Some older lights over here are also found in Cyprus. Like the one timestamped.

23:28 I pass that junction on the way to college and there is actually 3 Siemens sets on that junction. 3 fibre optics 2 are pedestrian lights and 1 Siemens LED. Like I don’t get the point I mean why put Fibre Optic traffic lights on a LED junction. Maybe it’s because some LED traffic lights aren’t very reliable. At some point PEEK will probably replace the fibre optics to PEEK LEDs again so the junction comprises fully of LED lights like it did when it was first installed in 2008.

I hope you enjoyed doing your survey! Another item that you didn’t see is the use of “part time” signals at some roundabouts, where they are sometimes not in use, i.e all black, depending on the traffic on various lanes, in an attempt to manage traffic flow on some routes. If anyone is interested in current standards, the latest bumf can be found here: www.gov.uk/government/publications/traffic-signs-manual Chapter 6 is the relevant one for traffic signals. Perhaps similar things are published in NZ and elsewhere; have fun.

4:30, well, traffic lights near homes or anything similar to homes, there will be no beeps. (I haven't watched the whole video yet so this may have already been said.) Every crossing should have a knob underneath the box where you press the button to cross. It spins when the green man appears. I'm assuming this is for blind-deaf people. Edit: yep it has

On the last part there used to be Mellors there

with the pelican crossing i like counting the yellow flashes when it goes back to green

16:00 its SRL traffic systems

Alex, I was filming some Peek Fibre Optic units and some knobhead rudely honked at us we drove past. So when you see that sequel video I made apologises for the idiot honking at us.

The white border helps you bc the border is reflective so if the lights aren't working you could see them at night Edit: "safety feature" -instant honking-

What lights and camera are taking images of cars running red lights?

Nice

Always a bit odd for me to see people keep left. Now the red-yellow (or red-amber as they call it in the UK) combination before green is the case is nearly all European countries except for the Netherlands, Belgium and France. There may be a few more exceptions, but Germany, Denmark and anything east of that uses that red-yellow-combo before green. (Now Belgium doesn't use it for normal car traffic, but light for trams and busses do feature the red-yellow, although red is then represented with a horizontal line and yellow with a dot, but the setup is other than that the same). Now that yellow flashing at pedestrian crossings is entirely new to me. Now I've never been in the UK before (unless you count my mother being there while she was still pregnant for me), but I haven't seen that system in any other country I've been before. In one way a bit confusing as flashing yellow is in most countries I know the traffic light is out of use (either because it's out of order, or because the traffic situation is not busy enough to justify leaving the traffic lights in operation), but I guess this only happening at pedestrian crossings and also happening pretty briefly make it up for that. So I guess I did learn something new today.

13:42 as soon as he said accident..

Nice video

there are some london spec optics in Norwich but only one

Idk about u but when u were crossing I heard a truck taking off but idk if it was a bin lori or not?

The Puffin crossings should have the green / red man lights the same as the Pelican ones, ie the pedestrian can see the light on the other side while crossing. (Dangerous not to IMO) Wish we could have a flashing green like they do in Russia just prior to going red as this “should” reduce light jumping.

1:07 they are actually peek traffic lights

Nottingham lights are becoming more like the London style not so many taped versions A few years ago I bought a siemans rag head lantern (helios) with halogen lamps. Plus pedestrian and standard hoods along with the arrow masks and tapes. All this so I can switch styles. BTW, I use it in winter in my bedroom where it lives, as a heater-cum-coloured light unit.

This traffic light that the person is talking about said it has got LEDs in it which it does not it's got a clear glass lens on it if it was an LED traffic light he will be able to see LED diodes

The Telents are commonly found in West London, same with peak

Hong Kong is using the same traffic light, Street Sign, Sign Walk, and Street light.

Bro thanks so much for this pls do me a favour pls do a video on the traffic lights in swansea 🥺🥺

13:46 Lol

2:39 I do hate when people just go by some traffic lights (probably mostly kids) and press the button when they don't cross I wish there was a penalty for doing stuff like that as if your in rush hour and people are needing to get somewhere you can get some tosser holding up traffic even more just pushing the button and walking off.

The cameras on it are just traffic cameras? Or they do pictures?

Why does Tower Bridge have the white border around the traffic lights? It is in Central London isn't it?

25:17 they use to be Mellors and Siemens? Not Microsence?

25:38 So weird having fibre optic on an LED junction

the traffic light without a white border will only appear in an urban area like the city centre and not just in London.

9:36

26:26 What street in Google maps?

13:28

Off and on

hen I see traffic lights with hoods i always think its switched off

🚦🚦🚦🚦🚦

🚦🚦🚦🚦🚦🚦🚦🚦😍😍😍

They put new traffic light cameras on wood green station I have know idea what is it

13:45

U.K. PEDESTRIAN CROSSINGS 1.Toucan Crossing = Two can cross Pedestrians & cyclists 2. PELICAN Crossing PEdestrian LIght CONtrolled PELICON (final spelling slightly changed). Wait light appears when button is pressed. Green/Red man appears on opposite side of road. 3. Puffin Crossing Pedestrian User Friendly INterface PUFIN (spelling slightly changed) Modern lights with censors on top of lights and on ground and pedestrian level. If pedestrian presses button, lights will let approaching car pass before turning red. If there are no cars approaching, light will change red immediately to let pedestrian cross. Censors also control how long lights remain red/green. Hence called user friendly pedestrian/user friendly interface. Also has red/green man on box with button below. 4. Zebra Crossing Must stop at a zebra crossing once a pedestrian has moved on to the crossing. You're not required to stop until the pedestrian has moved on to the crossing. (Anticipate ahead!) 5. Pegasus Crossing ‘Similar to how a toucan crossing is a puffin crossing that allows cyclists to cross alongside pedestrians, a pegasus crossing lets equestrians ride their horses across the road next to people on foot.’ (Google)

Beeping sound

Peek traffic lights🚦are my favourite

😂😂😂😂😂

b r o m l e a

Why is it rude to stare at a traffic light? Because it might be changing!

The lights in australia are shite

13:28

14:32