h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Following recent road works on London Road, Portsmouth, (just up the road from Chez Caveman) they installed some new beacons either side of the traffic obstruction/island. Where previous designs have featured the black and white horizontal banding seen on all beacons up to now, these have semi-translucent white banding.

The practical upshot of this is that if you stick a flourescent tube inside the beacon pole, the white stripes show up very well in the dark. This is, in fact, what they have done, and the result is quite impressive (although it's impact at 7:27am, when I pass it on the bus, is currently less than amazing, yet it's still fairly good).

One fascinating idea I've seen in France (which is cheaper to get to than London from down here in Portsmouth) is an hour-glass shaped light at traffic light controlled junctions. These are for the benefit of pedestrians, and count down, via a network of light-emitting-diodes (LED's) the time remaining until the traffic lights will change, thus saving the hapless pedestrian from risking their life running across infront of moving traffic, only to posthumously discover that the lights changed thre seconds after they were run over by a mad french motorist (and all french motorists _are_ mad, right?)

They've had ones like that in Leeds for a while. Pretty useful.

Sounds a bit spooky to me!

At the busiest intersection at my hometown, the countdown is in numbers, so you don't have to guess at what the drain rate of the hourglass might be.

It's actually harder to use at first, because unless you've already crossed the intersection enough times, you can't really tell how much time you're going to need. There's a walk-don't walk ideograph next to it, like all big city intersections, but until the countdown on this particular crossing you never knew just how realistic a measure of the time needed to cross was.