Has anyone found a good trick to trigger a stop light?  By  rockinez (Read 2,460 times)

There have been a couple of members here who tried the magnets, with mixed results. I always try to pull up enough so that any cars behind me can inch up and get their metal over the sensor.

In Vegas, they are slowly changing over to cameras, and those intersections do seem to work well. They also recently passed a law here stating if the light doesn't change through two full cycles, you have the right to proceed when it is safe to do so.

nearly every road around here has a median so i usually do a michigan left. even if the light is triggered it's usually faster to go straight if light is green or turn right if it just turned red and then do a U-turn.

If you call your DMV they'll usually adjust the ones you sit at most often. Best if you're willing to meet them there so they can test it with your bike. I haven't needed to call, but my MSF coach did on several area lights. Said those now respond to a bike same as a car.

I did call our roads guy about a poorly-finished road repair. They hadn't filled the edges to be flush with the rest of the street. I hadn't driven my scoot over it but could tell from the feel with my car's tires that it wouldn't be pretty on the bike. He had it fixed the next day.

My coach said anyone he's ever dealt with about things like this are very willing to work with you. They don't want unsafe situations that might result in accidents.

>'Kat

They do work. Go on Ebay and look for "rare earth magnet" and buy biggest one you want to spend money on and mount it as low as you can on the scooter.

We have a law in Minnesota that allows you to wait for a reasonable time, check to make sure it is safe, and then go through a red light if you can't trip the light on a cycle. I use it a lot at a particular intersection where there is no traffic but I can't get the light to change if I wait a century. We just adopted that staute a couple years ago but many states have it.

What I do is when I come up on an intersection, I move up passed the white line and let the car behind it the mark

What I do is when I come up on an intersection, I move up passed the white line and let the car behind it the mark

I have used the magnet method with mixed results. It helped with some stop lights but not others. I found that with some lights the city engineer had set it for trucks to discourage cars from using it as a short cut through the industrial park. They wouldn't change that one then. But others they did and some were set on a cycle as the loop in the road was broken.

Now I used a fairly large and strong neodymium magnet, something like 4 inches long and a 1/2 thick and a inch or so wide. It actually attracted some screws and nails to it when I was riding around. So it helped to prevent possible flats too. It was attached onto the frame underneath on the cross brace near the center stand. One thing is that it was near the oil drain plug, so one had to watch it with the wrench as it has the tendency to snatch the wrench out of your hand if you weren't paying attention. So it was a fairly strong magnet and it would hold onto things tenaciously.

But around here now, they are starting to put in the video detection systems where a computer uses a video camera to determine when to switch the stop lights. Those pretty much alleviate needing a magnet. But I figured, what the heck, it can't really hurt anything, so I used a strong magnet.