The owner of the green card went against the system when he decided to challenge the road fine.

Photo: Institute of Justice

In 2013, Mats Yarlstrom's wife received a check in the mail to pay a fine of 260 dollars for driving a red light.

It was not exactly the crime of the century. The camera caught her "Volkswagen" in Oregon: the red light of the traffic light at that moment burned 0,12 seconds. Others would complain, pay a fine and forget about it. But Jarlström, who received a degree in electronic engineering in Sweden, was curious: how long is the yellow light of a traffic light? He decided to investigate, but did not guess that interest would grow into a battle for freedom of speech. His story is told Los Angeles Times.

Yarlström, 57, the green-card owner, moved to the US in 1992 and now works as a consultant to help companies repair electrical tools. He does not have a technical license, but he proudly calls himself a “Swedish engineer” who wants to improve his community.

“Instead of being interested in how to do something differently or understand what they were doing wrong, they wanted to shut me up,” Jarlström said in an interview. — Road safety in Sweden is 250% better than in the USA. It's not just because we drive Volvos, it's because we have good engineers who are well educated and understand the details."

“I just wanted to contribute,” he said.

In Beaverton, the yellow light should be on for exactly 3,5 seconds. Using a stopwatch and two high-definition video cameras, Yarlstrom conducted his own tests at an intersection where his wife was fined. He said that his results showed that the yellow lights were on average 0,14 seconds, or 4%, less than advertised. He complained about this to the city.

“You may think it's a small mistake, but in the long term the time lost will be one full hour every day! (24 hours * 4% = 0,96 hours or 57,6 minutes), Jarlstrom wrote in a memo to the City Council. “Unusable accuracy with today’s technology—the ancient Greeks had better time instruments!”

Jarlstrom wasn't convinced by city officials, so he sued the city in federal court, but a judge ruled the suit didn't have federal standing—and it was dismissed.

Then the Swede began to ponder a more global question: “Is 3,5 enough for a yellow light?”. Taking into account the speed, driver response and other variables, calculations were made to measure the zone of the dilemma, which ultimately derived formulas for the yellow light adopted by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, an international association influential in the secret world of traffic technology.

Yarlström concluded that this formula does not sufficiently explain the fact that drivers are slowing down to make turns, which makes the yellow light time too short for some drivers. By that time, his mission had turned from fighting his wife’s fine into fighting public policy change.

Фото: Depositphotos

“I actually invented and publicly released a new, expanded solution to the original yellow light problem,” he wrote a year later in an email to Patrick Garrett, the Washington County sheriff.

However, this struggle Yarlstrema not over. After the council received his letter in 2015, the city launched an investigation.

1 November 2016 of the year the council sent him a civil notice that he used a vehicle without a license and fined him $ 500 dollars.

State licensing laws exist to ensure that the public does not suffer from untrained people who are allegedly experts. But Yarlstrom did not think that he should be a licensed engineer to criticize government policy.

He sued the state licensing council, with the support of the Institute of Justice, a libertarian organization, for allegedly violating his rights to free speech guaranteed by the 1 amendment.

“Jarlstrom wants to write and speak publicly about local, state and national issues: safety and justice and traffic lights,” the lawsuit said.

He also argued that state law created a "state monopoly on engineering concepts in general."

The city eventually retreated and agreed that it had violated Yarlstrom's right to free speech by applying state engineering restrictions to Yarlström "in a non-commercial and non-professional setting."

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