Traffic Light Charades

When facing a red traffic light as a pedestrian, you two options:
1. Ignore the red light and cross just cross the road.
2. Wait for the red light an get bored.

Ignoring a red light is not really safe, so pedestrians are forced to wait and get bored. Actually, an ANWB research (http://ow.ly/UOEri) pointed out pedestrians experience waiting for a traffic light as the second most annoying thing. Since we want people to have an awesome life, without being bored and/or annoyed, we invented "Traffic Light Charades" (TLC).

TLC uses the fact that a crosswalk with traffic lights will in many instances have people waiting at both sides of the street. Also, you can almost always see those people. Why don't we ever interact or play with them?

Remember the game "Charades" (Dutch: Hints)? We would like to apply this game to traffic lights. People one side of the street communicate a message to the people on the other side of the street by miming the message. The object/person/verb that they have to communicate is posted on the traffic light one side, and on the other side there is a sign indicating that they are part of TLC. They can start once the light turns red, and their time is over when the light turns green. Everybody "wins" when the message is transferred within this timeframe. They can then celebrate together while passing each other on the crosswalk, which is awesome.

You might wonder, why is this awesome? Well, (another) research (http://ow.ly/UOEaX) tells us that interaction with fellow citizens will make pedestrians significantly more happy. Also, it will give people an incentive to wait for the green light, which will prevent injuries.

We want to apply this game to several crosswalks across Amsterdam, differing the difficulty and the character of the message to the average waiting time and the amount of pedestrians.

We hope to tell you more about our plans in real live.

Funded by Amsterdam (November 2015)