The story behind this….in 1999, friends of mine squatted a warehouse in Reading.
Marconi/Siemens Traffic Control Systems had a maintenance depot nearby, and had dumped a load of obsolete traffic lights which we tatted. At the time Reading Council was changing from lights with incandesent light bulbs to smaller LED based models.
We used the lights as disco lights, and on these old lights it is easy to open up the “aspect” (the bit what shows the signal) for changing the bulb. The red/green man is in fact a solid disc of translucent coloured plastic, sprayed with black paint after a vinyl sticker of the stick man is placed upon it – this is removed leaving a red/green image of the stick man what gets illuminated by the lamp.
Now it is easy to scrape away the paint and add other bits to the design 😉
A mate of mine did two of these – the red man became a dude with a dog on a string, he kept the red man himself, but (being tall enough to do so) one night climbed up one of the remaining old traffic signals in Vastern Road, Reading – removed the original green man aspect and replaced it with this one..
This was done in 1999 but the pic was taken in 2003 and it was still there – despite several Siemens engineers doing maintenance on the signals – I suppose though anything what makes stoners pay more attention to traffic signals could be classed as improving road safety :laugh_at:
