'Intelligent traffic light could save lives,' proclaims a headline in today's Times over a story about technology that can delay a green signal when it detects that a vehicle is about to jump the lights. The same 'co-operative lights' system would also minimise hold-ups by adjusting the timing of lights to the traffic flow in either direction, according to research commissioned by the Department for Transport.

The news will be welcomed by anyone who has been held up at red lights when there is no cross traffic but you have to wonder about that jump detector. Obviously, when drivers become aware of the system, there will be some mad or bad enough to speed up at lights to force them to stay green.

The Road Transport Laboratory, which wrote the report, has thought of that. Cameras installed at lights would take the vehicle numbers of drivers deemed to be abusing the system, it says.

Cameras might get drivers who abuse the system prosecuted but they won't stop the abuse. And what about the drivers in the cross traffic, poised impatiently on red-and-amber...are some of them not going to start off prematurely, expecting a rapid change to green? What sounds like a safer system might turn out actually to be more dangerous.

The system could warn drivers how many seconds they have to wait  before a light change, the report says. Even more effective would be to allow road technology to control the vehicle, braking if it is approaching lights too fast or exceeding the speed limit.

Some of these ideas sound good, but there should be carefully monitored pilots before they are introduced. It is impossible to predict exactly how this sort of scheme will work out in practice: what price robot brakes on those occasions when the best option is to accelerate out of trouble?

London is infested with robot eyes catching people out and they do not inspire confidence.  Call me bitter but I have been done four times by them, three of them completely unfairly, including one to the level of absurdity. This was when I stopped, in accordance with the law, when my car was struck by another vehicle. The other motorist drove off, completely ignored by the robot surveying the scene. It did me for pulling over into a bus lane.

Some judgements are best made by humans, and we leave them to robots at our peril.