Florida drivers have started noticing blue lights mounted on traffic signals, and this is what they do.
It’s in areas like Gainesville, Fort Myers, and Orlando that these mysterious blue lights have appeared.
Whilst drivers have undoubtedly speculated on the various uses surrounding these lights, their actual purpose is relatively simple.
In fact, they play a key role in catching drivers who run red lights.
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What do these blue lights mounted on traffic signals in Florida do?
Traffic lights are extremely important to road safety, but how often do we think about what the colors mean?
Red means stop, amber means wait, and green means go.
Pretty straightforward, right?
Turns out, it’s occasionally way more nuanced than that.
One guy on TikTok is basically an expert on them and debunked a ton of myths surrounding them.
But even the standard three colors aren’t always what we get.
In Japan, things get a little complicated.
While it appears that the country has green traffic lights, they are instead called blue – or ‘ao’ in Japanese – for reasons that are too layered to lay out here.
Over in Florida, though, blue lights are appearing on some traffic signals – but they aren’t taking the place of the green.
In fact, they’re serving an additional purpose that many people would overlook.
These are confirmation lights, and they allow law enforcement officers to detect people who run red lights.
The technology allows officers to be ‘sure about which directions must stop or yield’.
Say if you have a driver heading south and they ran a red light, an officer previously might not have known if their light was red or not if they were facing the other way.
But with the blue light illuminating above, there’s no dispute now – and Florida drivers have no excuse.
Police have said it improves safety for the public, WUFT reported.
Is this system operating in other US states, and is it making a difference?
Florida isn’t the only state that has implemented the blue lights.
It’s also been rolled out in cities in Colorado, South Dakota, and Kansas.
But the more pressing question is this – are these blue lights making an impact?
Well, the Minnesota Department of Transportation conducted a study back in 2014 to assess whether confirmation lights had improved safety for Florida drivers.
The study found that crashes caused by running red lights decreased by 33 percent.
No wonder that Minnesota towns began seeing Blue lights mounted on traffic signals.
Another study conducted by the Federal Highway Administration said that confirmation lights had yielded ‘significant crash reductions for most crash types’.
So all in all, they’ve been a success.
And this isn’t all Florida is doing to get tough on road safety.
You might have heard about the Super Speeder law that came into effect recently.
If you drive more than 50mph over the road’s speed limit or go over 100mph on any road, you can now be sent to jail.
It didn’t take long for the new law to make an impact – somebody was arrested within two minutes of it coming into effect.
The law is even pushing some to give up their super-fast cars, as was the case with this Lamborghini owner.
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