During my 2019 Silk Road expedition, I started suffering from a strange and unexpected addiction. Traffic lights.
Traffic lights can be quite annoying, especially on roads you don’t know well. It’s not the principle of traffic lights that disturbs, it’s rather the difficulty in predicting their behaviour. Every motorist will recognize the sometimes unnerving put-in-first-gear-and-put-in-idle-again behaviour that can be really unpleasant, especially when traffic is busy and other drivers seem impatient or when you are in a hurry.
The feeling is somewhat similar to listening to music that doesn’t give you a momentary understanding of where the music might lead you. You fail to estimate how long it will last to the moment of relief, or even the end of the concert.
Traffic lights in Dushanbe – Tajikistan
Now, drive to the Caucasus, enter Russia, head to the Chinese border and return through Russia. That’s all that you need to start enjoying the relaxed approach and waiting time that the modern fully LED-equipped traffic lights afford. You’ll encounter them everywhere in this region, at least in the city centers. As soon as you enter Europe again, the thing you’ll miss like nothing else? Central Asian traffic lights.
What’s the big deal? Traffic lights in Central Asia are all (I repeat all) equipped with a count-down system that allows you to perfectly know when the light will change its colour. The orange light is announced by a double blinking of the green light, and everyone relaxedly stops his car when this happens. No one passes through an orange light! After the orange, the red light starts its countdown. During the last 2 seconds everyone shifts to first gear and drives off within the first half second of green. The same applies to the pedestrian lights. It’s as simple as that. So far apparently no one in Europe popped up with the same idea. Maybe because it doesn’t fit in with the war on drugs? Could be… because most of the population would become addicted in no time.