The wait at a red light is always irritating. It demoralises you as you see the cars from the other sides of the junction move ahead while you're stuck at your line, waiting for the walking green man to flicker while you slowly inch your car forward in livid anticipation for the lights to turn green. Its horrible!

The second worst part is when the lights are green, you are tearing down the road at some kilometers per hour and the lights change to amber and to red which make you screech to a halt all but to let no one pass because the pedestrians had already jaywalked but pressed the button at the traffic light much much earlier while you were still miles away from the lights. Malaysia has the solution and it has been around for quite a long time, so why isn't it implemented here?

As you can see from the photo[maikschroeer.de], there's a countdown as to how long you're gonna be stuck at the red light, or how long you have left to speed past the junction when the lights are green. And this is a wonderful system because you won't have the problem of deciding whether you should speed up or slow down when you're quite a distance away from the traffic lights and its still green. I'm sure many motorists face that problem everyday and I think this is a solution to that problem. Not only does it make your life simpler, I think it may make the roads safer as well because as the countdown closes in on 0, fewer drivers will take the risk of trying to jump the lights, and as a result, there may be fewer accidents on the roads. If we can have timers for pedestrian crossings, why not for the cars as well?

Hopefully this can be done on Singaporean roads one day because I think its brilliant, well done Malaysia..