I’m sure this has happened to you. You’re out for a ride on a hot Sunday afternoon. The back-roads offered up plenty of fantastic twisty asphalt for your pleasure and you’re beat. You’re now plodding down the secondary roads and you come to a quiet intersection with a traffic light. As you sit there feeling the heat from your engine flow up around your legs, your mind starts mulling over the idea of just running the light.
I have found a very reliable method for triggering the sensors on traffic lights so that running through the red isn’t necessary. If you can spot the inductive loop sensor on the ground (a thin rubber strip making a box on the street) try to position your bike so that you can put your kickstand down right on the strip. Putting a steel kickstand down right on top of the inductive loop sensor is often enough to “trip” it to let the lights know you are there.
Want to know why this works? Read on…