Studio art from Russia. Lebedev Studio has created a stoplight of a single panel that shows a continuous loop of different traffic signals.

Traditional traffic lights have colored circles that work hard to make roads safe. They’ve been directing traffic throughout the world for nearly a century; regulating the growing popularity of automobiles and minimizing potential disasters as we humans go from place to place.

Art. Lebedev Studio, a Moscow-based design business, believes they have come up with a superior alternative to their design, which has long gone unnoticed and mostly unmodified. Instead of stacking red, yellow, and green lights on top of one another, their traffic light shows signals on a single screen that changes color when the signal changes.

The traffic signal also shows additional information to accommodate color-blind drivers. It indicates the relative position of each light by an indicator such as an “X” for stopping, a “!” for slowing down, and an arrow for moving forward.

Different Symbols

Additionally, nonstandard signals are encoded into the traffic light, allowing vehicles to know when it is safe to turn on red and various additional road signals. When the light is green, for example, the stoplight might show you which directions you can drive-in.

Half of the screen is red, and the other half is green, with an ‘X’ signifying halt and an arrow pointing to the right indicating that right turns on red are allowable.

With every traffic light color change, there’s a countdown, letting vehicles determine when it’s safe to proceed or slow down. Other ways the traffic signal could be modernized by incorporating 5G capabilities have been suggested by Lebedev Studio. This would allow local governments to send out new instructions for display during unplanned roadwork or unanticipated accidents.

This is one of those concepts that, on paper, makes perfect sense, but it’s simple to pick holes in it since it dares to disrupt something we all know and love. LED is a cost-effective technology, so there isn’t much of a problem there. However, when we look at the images, we can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed with information.

Still, we may be wrong. The novel stoplight has already attracted the attention of two Russian cities, which have asked to test it in a limited capacity and are hopeful that it will help minimize the danger of traffic accidents. If it does, we offer it our approval!