the lights should be timed to however it makes the various bus/light rail networks of the city run smoothly.

we shouldn't be giving priority to people sitting in a private, enclosed, perfect-temperature, lazy-boy on wheels, while they are listening to their favorite music.

you aren't experiencing the infrastructure problem while you're in your car, you ARE the infrastructure problem BECAUSE you're in a car.

if this city set aside 7% of the street/sidewalk space for bikes, it would have a bike network like Amsterdam or Copenhagen and people would find that being on a bike is WAY less stressful than being in a car, and those who still need to drive would find WAY less traffic.

for a given situation, a car is a big improvement to an individual's life and a small penality to those around them.

we can make up a point scale to illustrate the problem. a car is like a +1000 happiness to the car user, and a -1 happiness to those they drive past (pollution, noise, danger to kids, reduction in green space for parking, etc.). that seems like a great trade-off from the individual perspective... until you get a large number of people all selfishing looking at that trade-off. you get more than 1000 cars in a neighborhood, then everyone is getting +1000 then -1001... so a net -1. you make it 10,000 cars and now everyone is at +1000 -10,000 and everyone is at a -9000. if one individual gives up their car, they move from -9000 to -10,000, so individuals selfishly don't want to take a step backward. the solution is that we have to form a social contract with each other where we recognize that more cars and faster cars in front of each of our houses, parks, schools, businesses, etc. isn't for the best, and we need to give other things higher priority. bike lanes and buses may each not be a +1000 to the individual, but they are a much smaller negative to everyone else. you look at cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen and they're quiet, pleasant, and poor people can own a viable mode of transportation for a couple of hundred bucks that will outlast a car if given 1/10th as much maintenance. same with transit. a tram going past every 5min is not as much of a negative as dozens of cars. if you're a bike/transit oriented city, then everyone gets a +500 happiness and a -0.00001 happiness for each person using those modes, so when you have 10,000 people using those modes, it's +499 to each person.