History Main / HackTheTrafficLights

* In an ''Series/MacGyver'' episode, Mac "hacks" the stoplights in a town in Europe to help him make his getaway, by putting fragments of a credit card in a timing gear.

* OlderThanYouThink. This was part of the ploy in the ''original'' version of ''Film/TheItalianJob'' (in 1969!!) — by switching the computer's big tape reel with a phony one made by the crew's computer genius, Professor Peach (played by a young Creator/BennyHill!!), they make Turin's traffic system go haywire, creating a massive traffic jam which the gold-heisting crew can then escape in their small and super-maneuverable Mini Coopers.

* Traffic lights are occasionally hooked up to the internet as a few articles show such as http://www.networkworld.com/article/2466551/microsoft-subnet/hacking-traffic-lights-with-a-laptop-is-easy.html and http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/technology/security/shodan/index.html. Some cities lights can sort of be hacked via other means besides the internet. For example a lot of cities have set it up so that emergency vehicles broadcast a signal which turns the light red and people other than emergency workers have done so.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Champions}}'' supplement ''C.L.O.W.N.''. When the founding members of C.L.O.W.N. were just teenagers, one of their "pranks" was to cause all of the stoplights in town to turn green at the same time. The writer of the supplement apparently didn't realize that this would cause cars to crash into each other in the intersections, leading to mass injury and death.
* The ''TabletopGame/D20Modern'' supplement "Urban Arcana" includes a spell which changes red lights to green in the path of the player's vehicle.

* Played with in ''Masked Dog'' by Raymond Obstfeld. The assassin doesn't hack into the traffic lights, but uses his super skills to memories their patterns, then manipulate his target into position by acting as a road rage hoodlum.

** Incidentally, where the original film turned every light red, causing traffic to grind to a halt all over the city but ''probably'' not directly harming anyone, the remake turned them all ''green''. [[InferredHolocaust Yeah...]]

Of course, in RealLife Not EverythingIsOnline -- traffic lights aren't hooked into the Internet. This makes this a subtrope of ArtisticLicenseEngineering.

* ''WesternAnimation/TeenTitansGo'', "Hey, Pizza!": Beast Boy and Cyborg do this on the tower mainframe in one of their attempts to slow down the pizza delivery man [[ThirtyMinutesOrItsFree in hopes of getting free pizza.]] [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption It doesn't work.]]

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* ''Series/Spooks''. In the episode "Outsiders" the VillainOfTheWeek has invented an algorithm that enables him to hack into any computer system, and one point changing traffic lights to cause a traffic accident among those investigating him.

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* ''VideoGame/WatchDogs'': Aiden Pearce is shown to be able to do this. In the E3 demo, he uses this ability to turn all of the lights of a busy intersection to green, causing a massive pileup that kills a few civilians.

* In ''Ghost in the Machine'', one of the DigitizedHacker's attempted murders involves hacking traffic lights to cause accidents.

* William Marshall's Yellowthread Street novel ''Roadshow'' is another pre-internet example, in which a gang of criminals deliberately cause gridlock in Hong Kong by a mixture of physical sabotage of traffic lights and computer sabotage.

* One of the first things we see in ''Film/TheDungeonmaster'' (note: [=AKA=] ''Ragewar'' and ''Digital Knights'') is the techie protagonist jogging while his computer changes the traffic lights in his favor.

* Done at the start of the ''Manga/YoureUnderArrest'' movie [[spoiler:as part of a terrorist plot created by an ex-Tokyo Metropolitan Police in order to prove his work on how to cause a terror attack on a country with first world standards.]]

* ''Anime/GhostInTheShellArise'': "Ghost Whispers", the hacking of traffic system electronics including the lights are done by rogue [=JGSDF=] Ranger soldiers in order to sell off the [=PANDORA AI=] system.

Traffic lights are extremely susceptible to being hacked in fiction. This can be done to show off a hacker's (or [=AI=]'s) power, or for the more pragmatic reason of letting the hacker and his buddies make their escape via car while their pursuers are stuck in the resulting traffic jams.