Image: engadget.com

The modern traffic lights have been around since the dawn of time.  With its classic red, yellow, green signals and the wait between them turning can get frustrating when your late for work and the darn light just won’t change to green.

We think we have found an alternative to the day old long traffic lights. Designer Thanva Tivawong has come up with a new method to our traffic lights. Tivawong has designed each light to have an hour glass design that ticks away with the number of seconds letting you know when the next color will change. In theory is could be a great idea. Just picture driving and coming up on an intersection, the new light design will tell you how many seconds till the green light turns yellow and then from yellow to red. This should cut back on many accidents because of the warning the light gives you thus less cars running red lights.

Now on the flip side this could be a street racers dream. Although street racing is a bad thing and should be taken to your local drag strip, its still happens like it or not. I am sure you have all played the car racing video games where at the starting line there are lights that count down till it goes green. This also goes in effect in drag racing with the Christmas tree. So you can see if there are two cars lined up at a stop light and there is a count down you are going to see an increase in street racing.

So although this is a great design and might save many lives, it may also promote street racing which may cause many more deaths.  We will just have to wait and see if this goes into further development.