The Traffic Lights of UCSD

I love everything about living in San Diego, even after an El Nino winter. The one thing I absolutely cannot stand is traffic. It's not that my area (UCSD) is terribly congested, it's that the traffic lights have a perverse way of slowing you down for no reason at all.
It all starts with the people. San Diegans are your average Southern Californians, to whom being in a car is a way of life and the availability of distraction is a fundamental civic right. As a result, traffic moves in the strangest patterns, and people have the hardest time getting started after a light turns green.
The next thing that is unpleasant are the giant boulevards that make up most of the roadways here. Usually, that should speed up traffic, but since there are many malls and the weather is nice, there are a lot of pedestrians (good) that take up incredibly long to cross these inner city speedways.
Which gets us finally to the final piece in my traffic tragedy: the traffic lights. They were built some time in the 80s or 90s and have triggers that tell the light when someone drove up. The idea, back in the day, was that traffic was going to flow better if the lights turned only as needed. Sounds good, right? The light stays green for the main direction of traffic for the longest time, and only when someone needs to turn does the light follow suit. Similarly, as soon as the main direction of traffic is in a lull, the light turns and lets the "minority direction" pass.
That sounds plausible. Now imagine what happens when traffic is moderately heavy, like most of the day: car trickle in from all different directions at about constant rate. The enormous amount of time it takes to cross an intersection plus the slow response times of San Diegans conspire to creating extremely long cycles for the lights, which means there is pretty much always someone waiting for the light to turn.
Perversion comes in: you get to a light that is turning red. You slow down, you wait for the light to turn green again. Then you start, and you get to the next light. Of course, since you were waiting with everybody else at the light before, there is no traffic ahead of you. A lull. The next light interprets it as a lull in traffic and turns red. You get to the next light just in time for it to turn, and you wait at the next light, too.
The perversion continues: the same story repeats light after light, and to cover the short distance of UCSD campus, you take 12 minutes - three times as long as you would when the lights don't turn, or 8 minutes of waiting for 4 minutes of driving.
And that, dear folks, just drives me crazy.