Why the Dutch Wait Less at Traffic Lights

See the youtube channel Not Just Bikes[1], specifically videos like - "Why the Dutch wait less at traffic lights" - [this video] argues that American traffic engineering is optimised for car movement, at the expense of pedestrians and bikes, whereas Dutch traffic engineering is to minimise conflict between vehicles and maximise movement of people overall. Leading to more complex but more efficient intersections. - "The Dutch solution for safer sidewalks - continuous sidewalks" - [link] has crossings at junctions where cars and people intersect designed so the cars visibly have to travel over the sidewalk through the people's area, instead of designed so the people have to visibly travel over the road, through the car's area. - "Crossing the street shouldn't be dangerous, but it is" [in North America] - [link] talking about length of crossings on wide road, traffic signals, priorities, etc. [1] [link]

Pedestrians generally have right of way. Singapore is pretty exceptional in this. Further, loads of Asian countries are pretty poor safety wise. I don't think a comparison to other Asian countries is beneficial. Singapore probably also benefits that owning a car is quite expensive, plus sort of ok public transport (a bus is terribly slow though!). Singapore still heavily favours a car. A public transport ride can be easily 2x-3x the time as a car trip. From your link: > Elderly pedestrians accounted for two-thirds of all pedestrian fatalities. (1 in 2 accidents involving elderly pedestrians was due to jaywalking) Singapore does seem safe in a deaths/100k comparison. There's some EU figures where the best country does about ~20/million (so around ~2.0/100k). Singapore has 2.2/100k. Things such as "jaywalking" is not a thing in loads of countries. Also, the traffic lights are horrendous. You need to wait way too long. See e.g. [this video] for various examples of way quicker lights.

To give a simple example, the US spends a ton of infrastructure. Yet it doesn't even have really smart traffic lights like the Dutch do. [this video] Just think about any large scale governmental software project and amplify that 10-100x. That's what I imagine :-) > The design of the website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and built by a number of federal contractors, most prominently CGI Group of Canada. The original budget for CGI was $93.7 million, but this grew to $292 million prior to launch of the website. While estimates that the overall cost for building the website had reached over $500 million prior to launch and in early 2014 HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said there would be "approximately $834 million on Marketplace-related IT contracts and interagency agreements," the Office of Inspector General released a report in August 2014 finding that the total cost of the HealthCare.gov website had reached $1.7 billion and a month later, including costs beyond "computer systems," Bloomberg News estimated it at $2.1 billion.