All to Myself, Thanks to Traffic-Signal Timing

I prefer to ride on quiet roads. I seek them out. You probably also do. But sometimes we have no choice. The Winter Street Bridge in my home town, Waltham, Massachusetts, is seven lanes wide as it passes over an Interstate highway. You can get to the bridge mostly on lightly-used roads. Other crossings are two or more miles away.

Do cyclists have to go miles out of their way to avoid this bridge? Not necessarily! CyclingSavvy strategies come to the rescue. I can get a lane on this bridge almost entirely to myself thanks to traffic-signal timing, and I’ll show you how. The example here can help you sort out challenging situations where you ride.

Taking a look at traffic-signal timing

Traffic signals generally have a repeating cycle. The video here shows traffic-signal timing at the east end of the Winter Street bridge. The signals block traffic from entering the bridge during a large part of the signal cycle.

The video describes a variation on a strategy taught in CyclingSavvy courses, “right turn on green.” You avoid turning right on red. Instead, you wait for the green light. Then, after you turn, a red light blocks traffic that might come from behind you. Sometimes you don’t even have to wait for the green, but only until the platoon of traffic coming from your left has passed. Good enough.

Left-turn options

A similar strategy can work for left turns. A large intersection like the one at the Winter Street Bridge will have exclusive signal phases for left turns, and that works strongly to your advantage. You may need to study the traffic-signal timing sequence to know when is best to enter the intersection.

If the best time is the end of a platoon, as in the video, it helps to have a good idea how long the green light holds. With a short platoon, you can be at the end and still get the green. It helps then to be good at accelerating, so you clear the intersection before other traffic starts up. We have another post about acceleration.

With a longer platoon, the light might turn red before you reach it. You will then be waiting at or near the head of a platoon. What to do?

There is a good Plan B: make your left turn, then pull over to the right curb and wait until you can get behind the end of the platoon. You wait a few seconds to get an empty street behind you. We’ll show that in a future post.

Is studying traffic-signal timing worth the trouble?

The CyclingSavvy course shows how to use Google Maps to plot a route. In Google Satellite View, you can zoom in to check lane configurations and see which intersections have traffic signals. In Google Street View, you can move along your route in steps of about 100 feet, and even sometimes notice the signals changing as the Google camera car advances. But sometimes you have to stand and watch the flow of traffic live, in person, as I did.

Your research need only take a couple minutes for each intersection, the length of a signal cycle. Certainly, it is justified if you will be using a route repeatedly.

Or maybe you are scouting a route for other bicyclists. Improbably, my bicycle club, Charles River Wheelers, held a ride in December 2021 which crossed the Winter Street Bridge. Why? The club likes to run its rides on the scenic, quiet country roads past the bridge. But, just uphill from the intersection in the video is a convenient food court with parking. Those considerations outweighed the issues with the the bridge.

As you ride in your local area, you’ll develop a repertoire of strategies. A bicycle club or advocacy organization might consider collecting them and publishing them online as a resource.

Looking deeper

In 2020, the intersection was reconfigured as shown in the before-and-after images below. Earlier, the bridge was widened from four to seven lanes — prime examples of auto-centric design. We may legitimately complain about bigger roads’ attracting more motor traffic. On the other hand, none of the roads leading into this area have been widened, and so the main effect on me as a bicyclist was to give motorists better options to overtake me!

If you find my suggestions intimidating, you could use the sidewalks, though they pose their own, different challenges. CyclingSavvy has advice on how to use sidewalks safely, too. Savvy cycling is about success in the real world — skills and strategies, not speed.

Independent mobility for children is desirable, but even with the sidewalks, children would do best to avoid this intersection. We don’t let children drive cars — same reason. Happily/unhappily, few trips that a child would make pass through this intersection. Office parks and big-box retailers surround it. Yet savvy cyclists have complete freedom to visit those destinations by bicycle, taking advantage of traffic-signal timing.

I support cycling options that serve children, but such options would be a low priority here and funding would more effectively be spent elsewhere.

You can benefit from this

I had been an urban utility cyclist for 50 years, an instructor and writer about cycling for more than 30 years, when I learned how to take advantage of traffic-signal timing through CyclingSavvy. Why didn’t I pick up traffic-signal-timing strategies earlier? I was good at creating space for myself the hard way, using hand signals. It just never occurred to me that there might be an easier, simpler and less stressful way.

There is always something to learn through CyclingSavvy, even for a cyclist with decades of experience!