In my experience, the Puffin crossings are setup correctly precisely 0% of the time.
If you are going to pay presumably a lot more money for all of the extra detectors and electronics then they need to deliver 2 things as mentioned by OP: 1) They make sure that anyone on the crossing has time to cross rather than stopping traffic for a fixed amount of time (useful outside schools) and 2) If there aren't any people crossing, the traffic should be stopped for a short amount of time no worse than if they were just a normal Pelican crossing.
However.
Even when no-one is crossing or in some case someone crossed and is about 50 metres up the road, the crossings are still usually on red for a total of often 20 seconds, which is way longer than most Pelican crossings that are on red for usually 5 to 10 seconds max.
I don't know if no-one notices or cares but it is really annoying!
My biggest annoyance are the ones that wait for a gap in the traffic. And by the time it goes green you have already crossed. They seem to be configured to be irrelevant for any able bodied person. And completely ignore current traffic conditions in favour of some hard coded delays.
Most around me seem to be in this mode. The traffic crawls past at pedestrian speed whilst a steadily growing group waiting to cross stand in vehicle fumes. There's a pretty clear principle here of flow conservation. If the light stopping traffic does not reduce overall flow then the light should change for pedestrians immediately. If the traffic flow is low, then a small reservoir is built up which clears immediately. If the flow is slow and saturated the gap that opens up can be refilled quickly. The flow range where the change actually impacts local vehicle flow is rather narrow (high, but not too high). Of course there are second order effects at associated junctions, but at that point maybe the first order interests of pedestrians should be prioritised.
A lot of misunderstanding here about "why would you invest in someone who has failed?"
An investor is a gambler. Not just on past success, although I'm sure Marissa has had some successes even if people don't know them.
They gamble on:
1) Has this person got the experience (good or bad) to run a business. A failed business leader is a better gamble than someone with no experience.
2) Does this person have a strong network so they can realistically pull in some really good people?
3) Has this person raised capital before?
4) Do they have a convincing narrative about why they have failed and what they might do differently?
5) Is the potential ROI high?
6) Do I have anything else I could invest in instead with better odds?
If I think as an Investor and not as an Engineer, I am not surprised that she has succeeded and I wish her all the best.
e.g. VCs invest in startups commercializing open-source foundational/infrastructure projects not only for the financial RoI, but also because it helps their portfolio companies succeed faster while maintaining a smaller headcount or spending less on non-core R&D.
I find a lot of these articles conflate two issues, which I have seen mentioned in some of the other comments.
1) There are objectively bad decisions that you can make regardless of "taste" or principles. If you search a list in O(n) for an items key, it is objectively worse than using a dictionary with O(1) search in most cases. It is not about taste or readability, there is a right way and a wrong way (or multiple right ways and multiple wrong ones).
2) Everything else is a matter of trade-offs. Map reduce or a loop? It depends entirely on performance requirements, what reads better in a specific scenario, maybe browser compatability or whatever but as long as the trade-offs are considered, I won't get bitchy to another Dev who decides that one is better than the other although I might disagree.
If something is wrong or the trade-offs haven't been considered though, that is a question of maintenance: do we care enough, is the performance bad enough, is the code visited enough to change it? In a lot of cases, the app will be deleted before it becomes a problem but it is still a question of trade-offs.
As someone said below, as long as someone has considered the "why" then its all fair game. I'm not sure that any of this is "taste" though.
I think you are misusing the phrase "tech debt" like many people do.
Not everything that is not perfect is Tech Debt, some of it is just pragmatism. If you end up with two methods doing the same thing, who cares? As long as they are both correct, they cost nothing, might never need any maintenance attention and will never be paid down before the codebase is replaced in 10 years time.
Same with people writing code in a different style to others. If it is unreadable, that isn't tech debt either, it's just a lack of process or lack of someone following the process. Shouldn't be merged = no tech debt.
Adding some code to check edge cases that are already handled elsewhere. Again, who cares? If the code make it unreadable, delete it if you know it isn't needed, it only took 10 seconds to generate. If it stays in place and is understandable, it's not tech debt. Again, not going to pay it down, it doesn't cost anything and worse case is you change one validation and not the other and a test fails, shouldn't take long to find the problem.
Tech debt is specifically borrowing against the right way to do something in order to speed up delivery but knowing that either the code will need updating later to cope with future requirements or that it is definitely not done in a reliable/performant/safe way and almost certainly will need visiting again.
> Tech debt is specifically borrowing against the right way to do something in order to speed up delivery but knowing that either the code will need updating later to cope with future requirements or that it is definitely not done in a reliable/performant/safe way and almost certainly will need visiting again.
Thing that many people do without even realizing they are incurring in tech debt. This kind of developers are the one that will just generate more tech debt with an LLM in their hands (at least now).
Code that demands to pay off its dept isn't non-working code, it's rather code that exceeds one's ability to maintain it properly (your mention of "unreadability" included). Whether a PR introduces debt isn't always known and often times has to be discovered later on, depending on how fast its maintainers fluctuate and the ecosystem advances.
That said, tech debt isn't paid by developers individually, it's paid by organizations in developers time. Only in rare cases can you make a deliberate decision for it, as it grows organically within any project. For example, most python2 code today that used niche libraries with outdated docs that have been taken offline in the meantime has to be considered expensive tech debt nowadays.
I'm a bit confused because you start by disagreeing with me but then end up agreeing with me.
> If you end up with two methods doing the same thing, who cares? As long as they are both correct, they cost nothing
To be clear, tech debt isn't "code that doesn't run". It's, like you later say "borrowing against the right way to do something in order to speed up delivery", which is what I said the authors thesis was.
No need for perfection. Perfection doesn't exist in code. The environment is constantly moving, so all code needs to eventually be maintained.
But I also want to be very very clear here. Just because two functions have the same output doesn't mean that they're the same and no one should care. I'll reference Knuth's premature optimization here. You grab a profiler and find the bottleneck in the code and it's written with a function that's O(n^3) but can be written in O(n log n). Who cares? The customer cares. Or maybe your manager who's budgeting that AWS bill does. You're right that they're both logically "correct" but it's not what you want in your code.
Similarly, code that is held together with spaghetti and duct tape is tech debt. It runs. It gives the correct output. But it is brittle, hard to figure out what it does (in context), and will likely rot. "There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix that works ", as the saying goes. I guess I'll also include the saying "why is there never time to do things right but there's always time to do things twice?"
Code can be broken in many ways. Both of those situations have real costs. Costs in terms of both time and money. It's naïve to think that the only way code can be broken is by not passing tests. It's naïve to think you've tested everything that needs to be tested. Idk about you, but when I code I learn more about the problem, often with the design changing. Most people I know code this way. Which is why it is always good to write flexible code, because the only thing you can rely on with high confidence is that it's going to change
I feel like this is one of those articles that claims some clever idea on paper but without experience of how this would actually work IRL but IDK if the OP has more experience than me so I will assume the best.
Others have already pointed out some of the practical things that would limit what you can achieve with shorter trains like minimum headway between trains and the congestion that would occur after a delay where you would expect people to wait for maybe 10 short trains to arrive and depart before you could get on.
There are other problems. The cost of the smaller trains means if e.g. 2 carriages each, then every other car is a driving vehicle with motors and control equipment. On longer trains, this could be 1 in 3 or 1 in 4. Each of these not only requires regular maintenance (so that's doubled the maintenance requirements) but also creates massive congestion issues in maintenance yards. Commonly, 1 or 2 full trains fit in each siding so getting most trains out if e.g. one is broken down is usually easy enough. Imagine having to move 3 or 4 separate smaller trains out of the way, they are not automated in the yards.
Most people would be very unhappy knowing that they might be alone on a train, which is a main reason why operators are not quick to get rid of all staff. But currently, a single driver and conductor is close by for, maybe, 8 carriages. This would double if you needed a single attendent on each 2 carriage train.
The signalling is very heavily designed around traditional trains with its delay after passing a signal. 4 x 2 carriage trains would utilise more signalling capacity/time than 1 x 8 carriage train. If these were all coming from the same location and needed to return, that would also need a lot more platforms so that the following trains don't block the first trains in terminal platforms. This is already a major problem at most UK terminal stations so that is largely unsurmoutable.
I also heavily question the idea that station cost is largely dependent on platform length. On most surface stations, platforms are relatively easy to construct and whether they are 4 carriages or 12 carriages long still require a station building or 2, some ticket machines and CCTV etc. For elevated railways that is more likely to be true maybe.
So yeah, like someone else said, we are unlikely to come up with ideas that 1000 other engineers haven't already asked, the easier problems to solve are around planning, design, legal rights for infrastructure projects etc. since these tend to eat up sometimes decades and billions of dollars.
Someone might have already pointed it out but for me, the sentence of RA is not the main issue, the issue is allowing a single person to stamp through an entire legal system and undermine all of the time and money that is invested in it, even if that person is a president.
I suspect that the idea originally was to give some safety valve but if it is used more than a few times by a President, it makes a mockery of it and it should be removed as a power. How can a President ever decide that the entire legal process is flawed and their opinion is right? If the sentence was too long then change the sentencing guidelines.
Why is it not a bad idea? Isn't it then just an example of Tyranny of the Majority?
Taken to the extreme, we could have an impartial legal system putting in prison criminals from an even mix of society, and then the president pardoning everyone from the majority group, leaving in prison only the minorities.
"Isn't it then just an example of Tyranny of the Majority?"
And how would you call a justice system, so complicated and convulted and therefore expensive that poor people (from minorities) don't really stand a chance to get their justice there?
Obviously Ross was not in that group, but I see presidential pardon as a potential tool to counter the flaws of the justice system.
And till those steps are implemented, don't you think you would enjoy it, if the next president would pardon Snowden, or your personal favorite case of unjustice?
As if the laws and justice of a nation are a questions of personal favorites! Maybe I have read too much enlightenment philosophers, but I happen to think in terms of general principles in this case.
This might be a good first step, too. Read more books from a time when people were struggling with arbitrary justice.
So you don't have them. That's ok. And thank you, but I did read a lot of books. History, politically, .. I just apparently came to different conclusions, but it is ok for me to not take this deeper here.
In a similar situation a majority could simply make it illegal to belong to the minority group. And without a way to pardon them the damage would be permanent.
You want a majority to be able to decide who gets punished and who goes free, and even the best designed laws will have unforseen consequences. If the majority is 'evil', well there's just not all that much that can be done in a democracy. Yes it would be better to live in a dictatorship of the most virtuous person in existence, but if you ever figure out how to do that please let me know.
Which is exactly what we do have: a president pardoning everyone from the majority political group. It's not consolation that the majority/minority groups are roughly equal.
Personally, I view the pardon as a form of veto power on the judiciary. Why is it reasonably that a president can veto controls, but not the judiciary?
All of the presidents pardon tons of people unpalatable to the other side of the political spectrum. They usually just save it for the end of their term so it doesn’t cause too much noise.
While it is true that there is always controversy, this does not mean that there is equivalency.
Yes, every president has pardons that are arguable (Biden pardoning his son, for example). And anyone pardoned has been found guilty of a crime, by definition. But not all crimes are equal.
Pardoning 1500 people that participated in a (luckily failed) insurrection that caused 5 deaths and 100+ injured, is an extremely bad precedent, and sends a very bad signal.
Pardoning people convicted of marijuana possession (like Biden did) is not the same thing as pardoning the head of the worlds biggest guns and drugs marketplace. Even if he did not kill anyone himself (it was proven, just to a lesser extent, but fine). Those drugs and guns most definitely did kill people.
> Pardoning 1500 people that participated in a (luckily failed) insurrection that caused 5 deaths and 100+ injured, is an extremely bad precedent, and sends a very bad signal.
Because you’re political view of it is indeed that they were having an insurrection. To the right they were just having a protest that got violent but not anymore violent than any of the others throughout the country that year.
> Pardoning people convicted of marijuana possession (like Biden did)
You mean he pardoned a bunch of drug dealers who will now go back selling drugs to children?
Do you see the issue here? The justice system is to try to cut through the bias and selectively choosing which part of the justice outcomes to ignore is going to be extremely political.
Anything clearly obvious is usually resolved by higher courts so the pardons are completely for when the president just decides “fuck the law in this particular way”.
Sure. It is true that violence and unrest is something that happens more often. And not everyone that day came to storm the senate.
But, as usual, this is a case of false equivalency.
Can we agree that when violence results in penetration of the national seat of power, during the transfer of power, that changes from "civil unrest" to "insurrection"?
This is like saying "but your honor, fights happen all the time", when trying to defend yourself after robbing a bank.
I won't even go into the fact that there is ample evidence that it did not "just got violent". Even if not everyone came there to storm the senate, there is ample videographic proof of people arriving geared up and organized.
Now. Regarding those "bunch of drug dealers". In fact, Biden commuted the sentence of 1500 non-violent offenders so that their punishment was in line with the punishment they would receive today. He pardoned 49 people that mostly have already purged their sentence and today are productive members of society (and there were being kept back by their record)
Really. Spend two minutes reading through the list of pardons, and after reading about the lives of these people, then tell me if you still think those people will sell drugs to children.
Honest question/thought experiment: if we only elected people who are qualified for their job (assume we can measure competence at least in some dimensions like we do for a myriad of other professions before we allow people to work in them) and if the election process was set up in a way where when casting your ballot you have to take a multiple choice quiz which tests for basic knowledge on what you will vote for and the country you’re in (as in “what is the household budget roughly, is this candidate in favour or against x, did the crime rate increase or decrease nominally” take these as rough examples of what I mean), to ensure that the people who vote for something have some clue what they are voting for and the broader context it’s embedded in (we require a license to drive a car, this would be akin to have a having a license to vote) would that remedy the situation a little? The idea would be that informed people would vote for informed people. Could you imagine this being a net benefit or not? I would assume it would make democracies significantly better than they are now. Imagine going to a doctors office to find out your doctor is a Plummer and he was voted into this job and that the people working for him and handling your prescription is a random assortment of people he seems to like.
I'm sure there are benefits and that might it help overall if implemented here and now in our current America with our current levels of public access to civics and career education (MAYBE.) However, this change would be the exact opposite or a total repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which good people died for. At a meta level, I trust those who died for voting rights to care more and know more about the correct answer to your question than I do, and I guess I would recommend to look back at historic speeches from MLK and other leaders to understand their full reasoning about why literacy tests were either irredeemable or undesirable, and their reasons for thinking so.
If we assume that both you and MLK were right, but that different policies better suit different conditions, then your proposal could maximize meritocratic effectiveness in an already-very-fair society, whereas MLK's way (the Voting Rights Act) provides a better minimum standard of human rights (similar to 1st and 2nd Amendment protections for people).
Thanks for pointing me to that. One thing that stands out about that argument though is that voting is already discriminatory, right? Permanent residents and minors are not allowed to vote (the latter because we take age as a proxy of competency, no?), despite facing the consequences of elections just as anyone else does. I do understand that a risk for misuse absolutely exists, but at the same time it looks like populism, social media abuse, smear campaigns, science denial and plain old corruption in sheep's clothing are rampant enough that we can agree that many many votes are cast by misled people, who would have made another choice if they really understood what they voted for. I guess it would boil down to the difficult question of which harm is greater.
I've had this thought before and my tentative conclusion is "no". It boils down to the purpose of democracy which is NOT to produce the best government but to make people feel ok about having a government at all.
The Ancient Greek experiments with democracy seem to culminate in a system that “gives you the government you deserve”. But those citizens also faced dire consequences for causing any harm to society—-that’s an important characteristic we’ve lost.
"this would be akin to have a having a license to vote) would that remedy the situation a little? The idea would be that informed people would vote for informed people. Could you imagine this being a net benefit or not?"
The idea has been around for a bit and I call it interesting, but also with huge potential of misuse.
Change the test slightly, so your target audience will yield better results, giving you a better result.
Either way, as long as climate change and darwinism are controversial topics, I see it hard to implement in a meaningful way.
While I can see this preventing many of the current issues, I can't help but wonder who will serve the interests of the people that are not allowed to vote.
Would it be a better system if the not-allowed group is totally dependent on the people that are allowed to vote?
I see. In a sense we are already doing that. Minors can not vote (and if I am correct the reasoning is that they don't have the competency to cast a proper vote) and even foreign permanent residents can't either, even though the outcome of the elections totally influences their lives. In a sense these not-allowed groups are already totally dependent on the people that are allowed to vote.
I guess my argument boils down to: We already discriminate. My thoughts are that the way we do it is not optimal.
Assuming a sufficiently functional congress[0], why not require that pardons go through congress as well rather than be unilateral presidential actions?
Yep. The problem is the system of elections itself. Biden and Obama also issued a lot of dubious pardons and commutations. The incentives of elections naturally favor short-termism and populism. Instead of having the people vote on candidates, we should randomly select citizens to an elector jury, which would carefully research and deliberate on the candidates before choosing.
> I suspect that the idea originally was to give some safety valve
That reminds me of the early 2000s, where there were a lot of US debates around around terrorism and "harsh interrogations" i.e. torture.
A certain bloc of politicians and commentators kept bringing up a hypothetical scenario where there was a nuclear bomb counting down, and some guy wouldn't admit where it was hidden in a major city. My favorite response to that involved presidential pardons, something along the lines of:
1. "So what? If everything you say is true, then the authorities would simply torture the guy and seek a pardon afterwards. We already have an exceptional mechanism for those exceptional situations, meaning that's not a reason to change it."
2. "Conversely, any interrogator who isn't confident of a pardon is on who does not believe it's at ticking-bomb situation, meaning they cannot justify torturing someone anyway, they just want to do it to make their job marginally easier. That's bad, so it should stay illegal."
It's part of the separation of powers and the system of checks & balances against powers of branches of government.
Congress makes laws and impeaches presidents, courts judge constitutionality of laws and try cases of treason and presidents appoint judges and grant pardons.
You can't have impeachment without pardon, otherwise, there wouldn't be a check against judicial tyranny.
It's a system of checks and balances. The Presidential pardon power is specifically a check on the power of the Federal judiciary.
Regimes have toppled in response to popular uprising against imprisonments perceived as unjust. Having a system of governance without a way to rectify that seems unwise to me.
The check on Presidential authority, in turn, is impeachment. It's not a perfect system by any means, but in my estimation it's a good one.
They literally gave the power of pardons so that one person could right wrongs. Previously, it was used a lot more than it is now. There are lots of people in prison on unfair sentences which are technically legal but still wrong. Sentencing guidelines are just guidelines.
Legal system is very often at odds with public perception of justice, changing the law is slow and does shit for people currently in jail - having veto power for elected officials is a good safety mechanism and helps perception of justice.
In the context of a deeply vindictive successor surrounded, it seems like the entirely rational choice to make.
It's not one that should be needed or acceptable, and had his successor been someone who seemed to respect law and order I'd have agreed with you, but in the present circumstances it'd seem crazy not to.
Because of very legitimate threats of politically motivated prosecution against them. Hell, his son was was prosecuted and dragged through the mud publicly, including in fucking Congress, for run of the mill regular crimes. Why was there such a treatment for a regular criminal?
Come on, that's such a cop out. Like even with an extremely partisan lens, it's a very very weak argument. Like yes, presidents and their family will be targets of more scrutiny (as you said, for political reasons). That's normal. What's not normal is pardoning your family to avoid said scrutiny.
Trump was also the target of "politically motivated judicial scrutiny" (and rightfully so!) So I guess he would be justified in pardoning himself and his entire family, right?
I'm not American and even I can tell you that this is a terrible attempt at false equivalence.
Trump was president and commited a ton of crimes while being one, and a ton of others before and after. He was rightfully prosecuted, but unfortunately escaped any real consequences. His trials were mediatised and saw big attention form politicians because he was a former president, who was impeached being sued for a ton of different criminal activities, including multiple directly related to his job (the top job in the US). His trials were directly relevant to the wider public and political establishment, and should have prevented him from ever running again for even a school board.
Biden's son is a nobody. No high positions in government, no power, no shady deals getting billions from Saudis or whatever. Run of the mill small time criminal who got paraded through Congress simply because his father was president.
It's really absurd to try to compare the two, or claim that the myriad of trials against Trump were "politically motivated". The man is a fucking convicted criminal, rapist, absurd creep, tax cheat, stole from a children's cancer charity, plan and simple and obvious for anyone. And uet he's back at the top job, publicly promising vengeance to all those who wronged him. He directly and publicly threatened Zuckerberg and others.
It's really absurd trying to compare the two, and I refuse to believe this can be done in good faith.
We have to. Short of arguing on first-principles, agreeing on them, and then using those principles to evaluate everything done on both sides, this is one of the top mechanisms we have to bring a spotlight to the contradictory mess we have on our hands.
Personally, I blame lawyers and prosecutors. A law should be simple, easy to evaluate if it was broken, and always prosecuted. And when it comes to punishments, they should be explicit and without the possibility of being altered.
We've gotten too complacent with making all these arbitrary rules, then fiddling with their non-enforcement and severity by virtue of reduced sentences.
Actually in matters of law (which this definitely is), "whataboutism" is just judicial or executive precedent.
This is like crying about whataboutism when a judge cites judicial precedent to justify a sentence. Good luck with that, it might work as a "nuh-uh" in online discussions but in real life, precedent does actually matter.
I understand what a precedent is in law and in life :) It seems like an illogical position to hold here.
Biden did bad pardons, now Trump has no other course (eg fix the system), but to do bad pardons as well? Except when Trump does it it is not bad because Biden did it first?
Maybe the legal system shouldn't have been used to go after individuals based on political reasons? Wouldn't that be a good start? Fed always win, so send Fed after someone and they will be in jail soon. It doesn't matter what they did or didn't do, this is sadly the way it's done now.
1500 in jail for protesting in DC? Really, less than that in jail after months BLM riots afaik. Sure, jail a few bad boys, but 1500? No way.
Throw a rock at people in power and go jail. Rape and murder is fine, no threat to DC.
The number of people is irrelevant. What is relevant is what each one did. If they did something illegal that is punished with prison time, they go to prison.
Trying to justify stealing the election, then trying to rewrite history saying the other side broke stuff when they prostested is the laziest sort of whataboutism I've seen on this site.
Trump and his minons tried to undo the results of an election. An election he lost. Lost even while abusing his power as president (see his calls in Ukraine and Georgia as evidence).
Nobody on the left supports looters or rapists. If there is evidence someone committed a crime, prosecute them. Trump is the only person I know that supports rapists (see Epstien and Gaetz). He says if you are loyal to him, you don't have to face the consequences of your actions. That to me is what is most scary.
It would be interesting to know why the Kenyan Government proactively levied a tax on EV imports. Usually this would be to protect local production but if the local production cannot supply, it is self-defeating.
I guess the real problem is that Governments are not agile enough to change this things as needed e.g. lets remove tariffs for 6 months and then revisit. If the locals can produce what we need, great, if not, we allow imports again.
If only BeyondTrust was called LeastTrust, it might not have used a global key to gain access to a load of very high-value targets.
To be fair though, most of what we use in these companies is a stack of containers of stuff that we just assume works properly, securely etc. and we don't really know if we use e.g. Citrix or VMWare or BeyondTrust or whatever, whether the software works as designed and whether it was only as secure as the people who wrote the code.
Like others, I think this is a solution describing an idealised problem but it very quickly breaks down.
Firstly, if we could accurately know the dependencies that potentially affected a top-level test, we are not like to have a problem in the first place. Our code base is not particularly complex and is probably around 15 libraries and a web app + api in a single solution. A change to something in a library potentially affects about 50 places (but might not affect any of these) and most of the time there is no direct/easy visibility of what calls what to call what to call what. There is also no correlation between folders and top-level tests. Most code is shared, how would that work?
Secondly, we use some front-end code (like many on HN), where a simple change could break every single other front-end page. Might be bad architecture but that is what it is and so any front-end change would need to run every UI change. The breaks might be subtle like a specific button now disappears behind a sidebar. Not noticeable on the other pages but will definitely break a test.
Thirdly, you have to run all of your tests before deploying to production anyway so the fact you might get some fast feedback early on is nice but most likely you won't notice the bad stuff until the 45 minutes test suite has run at which point, you have blocked production and will have to prove that you have fixed it before waiting another 45 minutes.
Fourthly, a big problem for us (maybe 50% of the failures) are flaky tests (maybe caused by flaky code, timing issues, database state issue or just hardware problems) and running selective tests doesn't deal with this.
And lastly, we already run tests somewhat selectively - we run unit tests on branch uilds before building main, we have a number of test projects in parallel but still with less than perfect Developers, less than perfect Architecture, less than perfect CI tools and environments, I think we are just left to try and incrementally improve things by identifying parallelisation opportunities, not over-testing functionality that is not on the main paths etc.
A real database should not be slow. Even with our tests running against a hosted SQL Server on a separate server, the database is never the slow part. For other tests, we run with the same database in a local Docker container with Docker Compose and it is fast and isolated/resettable.
Most tests should be unit tests, which are super fast. Integration and UI tests that might use the database should be fewer and if the database is slow, it might be related to your specific application or unoptimized database queries, our database calls are usually < 10ms
If you are going to pay presumably a lot more money for all of the extra detectors and electronics then they need to deliver 2 things as mentioned by OP: 1) They make sure that anyone on the crossing has time to cross rather than stopping traffic for a fixed amount of time (useful outside schools) and 2) If there aren't any people crossing, the traffic should be stopped for a short amount of time no worse than if they were just a normal Pelican crossing.
However.
Even when no-one is crossing or in some case someone crossed and is about 50 metres up the road, the crossings are still usually on red for a total of often 20 seconds, which is way longer than most Pelican crossings that are on red for usually 5 to 10 seconds max.
I don't know if no-one notices or cares but it is really annoying!