Istanbul Isiklarius traffic lights

[yaakov34]

When it comes to Lebedev's designs, one would do well to reserve judgement until seeing the final result.

For example, Lebedev designed bus stops for the city of Perm with tremendous fanfare, see here: http://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/perm/bus-stop/ . There were hundreds of press articles about it, which is surely unusual for a bus stop design.

It then turned out that the bus stops could not be built with rounded corners with the specified materials (http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/000220ap/), and that lighting couldn't be connected to most of them, and that the benches are too high and narrow (http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/0001h036/ - this is called "the Lebedev pose"), and that the flat roofs are inappropriate to the climate and now look like this: http://denis-galitsky.livejournal.com/33098.html .

It doesn't help that Artemy Lebedev is a giant, giant douche nozzle - if you read Russian, you can convince yourself of this by browsing his blog.

[Iris]

Not particularly motivated to support Lebedev, but my understanding regarding the bus stop benches is that they are uncomfortable on purpose, so people won't sleep on them. London's bus stops have these seats as well.

[rimantas]

  It doesn't help that Artemy Lebedev is a giant, giant
  douche nozzle - if you read Russian, you can convince
  yourself of this by browsing his blog.

Yep. The things they do are not that great to allow for his tone. "Kovodstvo" was a good read for me when I was starting my proffesional career as webdev (around 1999), but I left it for the higher quality in English (and because Lebedev's studio still cannot code HTML).

[jsrn]

"[...] if you read Russian, you can convince yourself of this by browsing his blog."

there is an English version of it here: http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/

which is a translation of http://www.artlebedev.ru/kovodstvo/sections/

(I don't know if this is the blog you were referring to)

[makmanalp]

Wow, as an Istanbul native, I'm surprised that the city govt is doing it right by handing design to a design shop. I like how it looks, it's odd and quirky, but I think it somehow fits with the city. For the record, Isik + lar means "lights" (the suffix is a pluralizer), and I'm guessing the "us" is the generic latin name suffix?!

[simanyay]

Yes, Artlebedev studio ends most of its products with generic latin name sufix.

[jrockway]

It's too bad that traffic signals don't make their state available via some sort of radio link. Then we could have cars that provide the driver with an optimal target speed to get through a series of intersections without stopping.

[valjavec]

Ingolstadt (city of Audi HQ) had (still has?) this experiment.

Cars were getting signal from traffic ligjts and you as a driver got a warning sign like: "drive 30 km/h" to hit green light without stopping.

[dmazin]

Some cities in America have traffic-synchronized streets where a driver going a certain (indicated all along the street) speed should hit the greens every time. The problem one one street I've seen it used for is, the sign is very vague about when this system is active "during peak traffic hours" so I do not know when to go the suggested speed or not.

[michaeldhopkins]

That wouldn't fly with the many cities that depend on traffic tickets for revenue.

[tchvil]

As a passenger of a Dolmus(Turkish taxi bus), scared by their driving style, I heard a joke a while ago: "In France, traffic lights are mandatory. In Italy they are optional. In Turkey they are decorative". It looks they took it seriously.

[wizard_2]

I always got a kick out of these buses. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmu%C5%9F

  These share taxis depart from the terminal only when a sufficient amount of passengers have
  boarded, and the name is derived from Turkish for "apparently stuffed" for this reason.

[docmarionum1]

I was in Istanbul a few months ago and the traffic was the craziest I've ever seen. It didn't really seem like anyone paid attention to the traffic signals anyway. I don't see how a new design would help fix that.

[gst]

I just wanted to post exactly the same. I haven't yet seen any other city with a traffic as bad as in Istanbul: Drivers typically don't care about traffic lights and drive without braking and just honking over pedestrian crossings, even though they have a red light and there are pedestrians on the street. In case of traffic jams drivers just continue driving on the sidewalk. I saw deadlock situations on crossings multiple times a day, because drivers just continued to drive into crossings, even though they had a red light and/or the crossing was blocked. Police does not seem to care at all.

I don't see how new traffic lights would change this.

[_b8r0]

Istanbul is about 3000 years old and built on 7 (some very steep, think San Fransisco steep) hills. It was never designed (if designed is a word you can use at all here) for either tall buildings or vehicles.

Over the past 10 years something weird happened, people started buying cars, and some people would buy more than one but as most people live in apartments in Istanbul it appears as though there are more cars on the road than there are parking spaces in some areas (I know this is the case where my in-laws live near Nisantasi).

In my experience Istanbul drivers will mostly adhere to traffic lights, but not necessarily to things like zebra crossings and road markings. The worst drivers tend to come from the countryside as they don't necessarily know the road layout and drive as though they're in a village or open countryside.

I've been told quite a few times that the only reason the fatality rate from car crashes is not as high as it should be is because for most of Istanbul it's hard to drive faster than 50kmh for any period of time.

Of course, if you really want to see what 'driving by inshallah' is like, then you need to go to Saudi Arabia. When god determines whether or not you live or die, there's no point in driving properly.

[jetz]

Interestingly Istanbul-drivers are not liked at all in other parts of Turkey as well. When asked they say they have to otherwise they will not make it.

[orionlogic]

Once a book on chaos theory started the topic by describing the traffic in Istanbul.

If you are able to drive in Istanbul, you can drive in everywhere.

[watmough]

I spent a week there, and truthfully it didn't seem any worse than Houston or New York. Not really all that much traffic, and what seem like drivers who are used to the locale. Down near the harbor, I never saw a car run a light in all the times I walked from there back up to my hotel in the old town.

[ZoFreX]

Honestly, it's not that bad. It takes you a while to get used to it but if you look around, everyone is paying a lot of attention and it isn't actually dangerous at all - hectic, but not dangerous.

[yread]

Check out the process page http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/isiklarius/process/ I really like the ones by Ji-youn with a triangle for stop, circle for orange and rectangle for green. You can see some serious effort went into this

[gnubardt]

Since each color is an LED display and can display shapes it'd be cool to use the traffic lights to direct people to detours when a road is closed or over capacity.

[forbes]

More likely the STOP will be used to display advertising while people wait. 8-) "McDonalds in 200m"

[thejbf]

It would be reasonable, no one seems to care about traffic lights in Istanbul.

[mjs]

"Isiklarius is equipped with a system developed in our studio that detects visually impaired and handicapped pedestrians."

How does that work??

[ars]

It doesn't. This is imagination, not an actual product.

[afsina]

I think in short time this light colors would go black with exhaust smoke. And as someone who drives in Istanbul some time to time, I think what Istanbul needs is strict control and huge fines. Traffic is full of aggressive *astarts who does not respect any pedestrian or other drivers.

[forbes]

Quite a beautiful design but I would question the durability of the wood-veneer model. That finish is generally more suited to interior use and would start to look pretty tatty in a couple of years I expect.

That said, I want them for my city immediately.

[umtrey]

Also, from a design standpoint, the idea of using LEDs is being challenged - while the designer mentions a lack of snow build-up, the traditional lights do a good job of emitting enough heat to melt snow drift:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34436730/ns/us_news-life/t/energ...

It's not an entirely obvious problem, but one that is being dealt with often in colder climates. Unintended consequences of design.

[hackermom]

Reading this got me thinking about the sound signal schemes that traffic stop devices - sometimes the lights, sometimes the push button boxes - emit to aid those with visual impairment.

The Swedish system is a mechanical ticker placed inside the push button box, like a very loud clock that ticks slowly at one tick about every other second during red/yellow, and then picks up pace to about 7-8 ticks per second during green, cleverly aimed towards the listeners' intuition, telling them to "slow down" and "hurry across". I remember how this even served a good purpose and reminder for me as a kid, when I was too young, too impatient and too reckless to pay attention to the streeth lights - but the loud and clear sound signal and its intuitive meaning never escaped my attention.

What's used where you live?

[jevinskie]

My university (Purdue, USA) has an audio countdown with a seconds tick.

[eru]

You can also hear those ticks in parts of Germany.

[gcb]

never liked anything from that studio. but then, i don't like Dyson too...

but this proves my point about art lebedev. they got an assignment to redo traffic lights, and just made then square. ...oh, and use the newest led tech buzzword! don't forget the latest led tech buzzword.

[ZoFreX]

If you read their earlier post on it, the squareness is far from a quirk and actually a very well thought out design decision. Obviously design is a matter of taste, but like them or no, their method is a lot more than just being quirky or using buzzwords.

[ahmetalpbalkan]

wow some Turkish stuff on HN. nice to see.

[ansgri]

More Russian than Turkish though. art.lebedev studio is russian.