Extending yellow times could also backfire by causing longer queues at lights and more rear-end crashes as motorists are surprised by the stopped traffic, said Ms. Eccles, the transportation-engineering consultant.
Nortel claims its Shasta 5000 BSN for aggregated DSL or cable offers services such as network-based firewalls, virtual private networking, and traffic engineering for several thousand subscribers over a single chassis.
"The state is making a short-term decision to get traffic moving quickly, " said Charles Roeder, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle.