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VERIFY | Are there pressure plates at intersections to turn traffic lights green?

Are there pressure pads at Little Rock intersections to turn traffic lights green? Or does having your headlights on at night trigger lights to turn green? THV11 verifies these questions.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) - THV11 works to Verify fact versus fiction.

Nothing is too small or too large for our team to verify.

Our aim is to uncover information you want to know, and this story is about a specific question about city traffic lights.

"You can look out there and you can see the square, where it's sealed in, the shiny asphalt, that's the loop," said Bill Henry.

Henry is the Little Rock City Traffic Engineering Manager. His job is to make sure traffic runs smoothly and this includes designing and monitoring the city’s 330 traffic lights. THV11 viewer Susan Hedin had a question for him, she asked this, “I have always heard that there are pressure plates at red lights, so you would have to pull up all the way to trigger the light to turn green.”

First of all, can Henry verify if that's true? “Well it was 50-60 years ago," said Henry. He verified it's not true. But only because the pressure plate technology is outdated. Instead, the city uses something called induction loop technology.

"They'll saw a square in the pavement and they'll wind loop wire in that and seal it and bring that wire back to the cabinet and tie it to loop amplifier," said Henry. “Every time somebody runs over the loop it changes the magnetic signature going through there and gives a pulse to the controller saying there's a car pressing."

The controller is a silver box filled with technology. There's a controller located at nearly every city intersection with a traffic signal. Hedin also asked at night do your headlights on trigger a green light?” “No. They don't do anything," said Henry.

Headlights don't trigger anything he verified, but traffic cameras on top of the lights do pick up your presence and then send a signal to the controller to change the light from red to green.

“You can see the squares light up and you can see they're detecting cars," he said.

We can verify there are no pressure plates, but instead loop technology along traffic cameras that signal cars are present, which then tells the controller to change the light from red to green.

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