Traffic Lights Grind My Gears!

I don't watch Family Guy, but I think it's funny that there is a man on the show that always says, "you know what grinds my gears?"
I know how he feels since there are many things in this world that make me feel the same way, and a big problem I have are traffic lights. Those dastardly evil lights that rule our world by commanding and prohibiting our freedom to move.
I actually love traffic lights because I've seen the chaos in other countries where large intersections are insane without some kind of order. Please watch the video before you continue to read.


I know the video is moving faster than normal, but still it must be insane, since many cars are  not even in their proper lanes. I would be terrified to drive through there, and would look for a different route.

There are two problems I have with traffic lights, and the first one is the moment we look around and no one is moving. There may be many cars on each side of the intersection, yet we are all held against our will in what must be insanity.
Of course, each time I wish I was the one moving, but I would be happy to let anyone go, and not make us wait as if the light is playing a cosmic joke on us.

The second problem is when a light stays on it's regular cycle, even though it's 5:30 in the morning, and I'm the only car there. Yet, I must wait for all the lights to change to green before it comes back to me. The lights near the freeway can be excessively long, and it just doesn't make sense, that there isn't sensors in the road to change during off peak hours--from ten at night to six in the morning.

Besides all the wasted time, my biggest pet peeve is the gas that is wasted every day. So I decided to try to find out how much is wasted by idling frivolously at traffic lights.
I really haven't any idea what the correct mathematical procedure would be, but just as Hercule Poirot uses his little gray (brain) cells, then I decided I would try to find out by using mine.

I found out there are 253 million cars in the US, but only 210 million drivers, so let's just say 200 million people are driving on a Friday--it might be last Friday or this coming Friday, but just Friday will do.


For every two minutes our cars idle will be equivalent to driving one mile. That is what the experts reported on one website I found. Whether it is correct or not I'm not sure, but in the absence of any other amount, I will use these numbers.

So on this particular Friday, 200,000,000 cars are driving up to traffic lights, and each one idles in one of my scenarios above. I'm only going to have them  over idle for one minute, which is equal to 1/2 mile, so each car is wasting 1/2 mile of gas by the lack of improper light usage.

I'm choosing that most cars average 20 miles to the gallon at around three dollars a gallon, so that is 1/20 a gallon at 0.15 cents. I think that most cars faux pas idle more than a minute a day, but we will go with  just a minute anyway.

So 200,000,000 cars divided by 1/20 is equal to ten million gallons of gasoline every day, which I don't want to know that equals in one year.
In terms of  of money that is 0.15 times 200,000,000  equals 30 million dollars.

I'm terrible at math, so I' sure that I'm off by several zeros, but even if it's much lower, shouldn't we try to make all the lights work more efficiently to save our dependency on other countries.

Please help if you can understand math, and have a formula to let me know if I'm correct or if you even agree with me about over waiting at lights which causes the over idling of our cars.

John Lennon said, "Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives....."
I'm not sure if this is true, but someone needs to come up with a better idea than the same invention that is almost 100 years old, or at least improve the quality of the device.

I guess that is all I have to say about that.