Traffic lights are one of the most universal signs on earth. And yet accidents still happen daily from people crossing them illegally (both pedestrian and motorists). This shows how even the most inclusive solution to meaningful problem have room for errors that are derived from people's behaviors alone. It's a human problem as much as a technical problem.
But this does not mean that the traffic light system has to be reinvented as a whole (the circle). An effective solution (the dot) can only be produced by taking in the local context of where those accidents are actually happening. Solving the dots is the equivalent of finding a needle in the haystack every time for each permutation of the incident, which is a difficult but valuable job. It's the equivalent of the think globally, act locally mindset in activism.
People who were fed up with finding this needle will then attempt to:
- Swap the whole circle with a reinvention that risks itself against untested variation of the method (acting too globally)
- Take a stab at each possible dot they can find and risk some unintended consequences (thinking too locally)
Road to progress is equally paved with both arrogance and ignorance.