In college, I lived close to my university’s campus near an intersection that would get very busy during sporting events and other occasions where there would be many people in town.

The intersection would set all the lights to red if it had detected no activity for a good while (such as at night when it was rarely used) and would also immediately change the green light for cross traffic to red if you pressed the crosswalk button so long as there wasn’t any cross traffic for a few minutes.

It was surprisingly sophisticated traffic control considering that most of the other intersections were just on simple timers.

I wonder if there were power surges or some other electrical problem that kept on killing the motors.