When I go back home to central VA, this is how I trigger them. Blinky right in your eye, sensor beyotch!

+1000 I thought it was beautifully done satire, I bow before the master. ;)

(I just wish there was I way to sneak that into our legislative testimony this year and have the legislature get it.)

:roflmao2:

During daytime it seems hit or miss with these new fangled sensors. Even at night I can't get some of them to trigger and the last time I asked the town about fixing the light on this road to work like another intersection I saw them out the next day fiddling with the working intersection and I never got it to trigger again! :(
Unfortunately for me there are is very rarely a crosswalk as they only put them near schools. There is this one really neat intersection I get to for better or worse really tick off some car drivers.
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_GIFgiCQnK-8/Sa...tersection.JPG
On the way in if traffic is light I can take the purple line to cross the street and not have any problems even though it is a 55mph road. If traffic is too heavy though I end up going down the sidewalk in the green line and hitting the cross walk. After a minute or two I'll get a cross walk and a greenlight for the west bound traffic but not for me. I can proceed waaaaay down that road until it moves off before the westbound light turns and traffic resumes.
Coming home it is must the same deal. If there is another car I can follow the blue line straight across and the light doesn't even last for the time it takes me to cross. No other cars I hit the crosswalk and follow the yellow path up the arterial and down the side road and I normall get to the end of the yellow line there before the main roads traffic resumes.

I've seen those links before, apparently I misread them. Now I see why I triggered the one light by going down the side of the sensor :). I'll have to look at the cuts at the other signal again.

Everything here is on timers ! Never even saw a button for walkers untilI was a vacation The Detroit metro area and Detroit well suck . If my wife wold retire AGAIN I would pack up and head south .

Though, not all people have a helmet light, like yours, that can vaporize a ninja-cyclist at 50 feet.
:roflmao2:

Oh. I see. As the unit melts, it shorts out and causes the light to switch. Must be why they are always out there replacing the sensor. I can be kinda slow at times:D

You just haven't found the sweet spot. I don't own a bike made of steel and I can trip nearly every light I run across...as long as the sensor isn't buried. Aluminum or titanium, mountain bike or road bike.

It's the rim that triggers the induction loop and either steel or aluminum will do it. We need to hear from someone who commutes to work on city streets on full carbon fiber disc wheels for tubular tires with no metal in them whatsoever to see if he can trip an induction loop by lining up his valve stem.

I ride thru one intersection daily (me on residential street crossing arterial) with an on demand camera detection system. It works beautifully and has never failed me, day, night and heavy rain. At night it works even better as it detects my headlight from far enough away that if I slow down a bit the light is always green by the time I get to the intersection.

Different places have different systems with varying degrees of sensitivity.

At the bottom of the link I posted are more links to finding the sweet spot on most of the commonly used detectors. Dr. Steve even has advice on the camera type detectors...which is about the same as I said.

If you read back on this thread you will see where I talked to local transportation engineers regarding the street sensors... and they told me that the old systems that make up the majority of those in use in this town have very little in the way of sensitivity adjustment. They were made in the mid 60s. (oddly enough my grandmother used to be employed by one of the companies that made these... she hand wired the boxes)

These old systems are being replaced, very slowly.

The engineers confirmed that putting a bike on the wire loop may trigger the sensors... or it may not as the wires are buried too deep, the system may not be able to sense that well, street repaving may obscure the loops, or the loops may not have been installed correctly.

In other words, "different places have different systems with varying degrees of sensitivity." What works for you may not even be the same age or type of system as that which exists in my streets.

k

I've successfully used the techniques described by Dr. Goodridge (even before I'd read the article:rolleyes:) for many years in many places...Vermont, Colorado, DC, much of the New England area, the Northwest, Wyoming, Montana, etc. You are correct that you have to know where the sensors are and if the wires have been buried, because of repaving, their sensitivity is reduced. I don't have a 100% success rate at all lights but my success rate is very high... >95%... if I can find the loop.

cachehiker is under the mistaken impression that you have to have a steel bike to trip the induction loop. You do not. Dr. Goodridge's article shows quite clearly that it is the wheels' interaction with the loop that does most of the heavy lifting. Even carbon fiber wheels should trip an induction loop since they are conductor moving through a magnetic field. (I learned the conductiveness of carbon fiber while fishing above timberline in a gathering thunder storm. Luckily I figured out that the snapping sound coming off the rod was the build up of electricity before there was a discharge:eek::eek::eek::o) But for a bicycle to have any kind of chance of tripping an induction system, you have to be positioned over the loop and, preferable, the most sensitive spot... i.e. the sweet spot. If you aren't over that spot, even the most sensitive loops around won't pick up a bicycle.

I'm with cycco and have >95% success rate as well - all quadrupole sensors here.

I think there are two ways these systems (camera or loops) could be improved:
1. Have the sweet spot marked. Not need for fancy bicycle icons, etc., just a narrow (say 1" wide) line of any color.
2. A 'detect achieved' feedback mechanism. Perhaps a LED on the signal light post (more complicated of course if there are both left turn and thru lanes)

Al

Well there is a feedback mechanism...the light turns green:thumb:

I meant instant feedback. Many (at least round these parts) don't start to turn green (start being when the x-traffic x-walk signal starts to flash) for up to 1min and often more after being triggered. This leaves the cyclist not knowing if they actually have triggered the light leading to assuming the light is non-functional.

The only instant response light I've ever encountered locally is the video triggered one I wrote about earlier in this thread. X-walk signal starts flashing as soon as I approach.

Al

I know. I was just being a smart ass:rolleyes:

I do use the cross walk signal to tell me if I've been successful at tripping the light. I've got one on a busy street that takes about 2 minutes to cycle through. That one is very frustrating:notamused: