Question from a completely clueless perspective. The points you mention I always have and I have been wondering where to simulate it and get numerical answers to all those behaviors that can be infuriating. In your seattle full map you say you heuristically got the time for the lights, but where is that coming from exactly, like would it be possible to infer that for another city from some kind of public data. Is it in the domain of science fiction, there are so many parameters to take in account so it probably is impossible, that you could model the usual behavior of commuters in a city and then simulate whether the current traffic lights are set for the right length of time. I suppose some are updated live to react to traffic jams but in these circumstances there could also be way to simulate how shifting times would be the best to refluidify the traffic, instead of just going with brute force and empirical intuition which I assume is how it works most of the time.