When did the meaning of traffic lights change?

[Andrew]

But they can multi-task. Drive *and* apply makeup and eat breakfast simultaneously.:-)

[NY]

Not only *can* but actually *prefer to*. My wife finds that browsing the web helps her concentrate on a film that she's watching on TV, or that doodling helps her concentrate on what people are saying in a meeting. I'm just the opposite: the foreground task (browsing web, doodling) makes me switch off from what's happening in the background (TV, meeting). For the same reason I find it difficult to listen to an audio book while driving because the task of driving means that at times of extra concentration (junctions, heavy stop-start traffic, navigating) I block out the book, and then find I've missed plot points.

There was an online test that I saw recently about how many hazards someone missed while trying to remember a shopping list that someone gave over a mobile phone. I found I saw every hazard, because I switched off the background prattle of the mobile phone call - anyone who is daft enough to read out a shopping list to someone who is driving doesn't deserve to get anything sensible when the driver goes shopping ;-)

Some of the "hazards" were spotting incongruous things like a clown on a zebra crossing or Darth Vader walking along the pavement. ;-)

[bert]

Didn't Top Gear do their own version some time ago? Amber means put your foot down cos the lights are about to go red.

[bert]

Remember when the Red Guards in China decided that it was wrong to have the revolutionary colour to mean Stop so they decreed that in future red would mean Go. Was quietly changed back soon after. Perhaps Corbyn will do that if ever gets to be PM.

[jeikppkywk]

Yes, they do in Australia.

[Max Demian]

Why? It's just a convention. Based on the port and starboard lights on boats and planes. It could have as well been the other way round. (China is a big place, and isolated in those days.)

[charles]

You also need to think of "Red Square" in Moscow, But the Russian word for 'Red' also means 'beautiful'.

[bert]

Because the result was chaos.

[Max Demian]

They just had to send the drivers for "re-education".