Stoplights on rural 4 lane highways

Out here they usually have a yellow "Prepare to stop" sign with a flashing yellow light a couple hundred yards before the light. Seems to be what you're describing. Might be faster to call the city or county public works department for something like that.

America sure is great, I had a similar experience in my personal vehicle. Heading north out of Milwaukee at about midnight doing 70 in the 55 on the interstate as is typical for Milwaukee. The only difference were absolutely no cars besides me and the cop I merged onto the interstate infront of. Got my $180 ticket and 4? points. 3 days later got a letter from a lawyer, had to pay him $60 and a $260 "Parking Ticket."

Side note, I was 20 at the time, been driving for almost 5 years including my temps and it was the first time I was ever pulled over. Naturally couldn't get a warning -.-

These sort of arrangements are pretty common from my understanding, especially in the larger cities.

If the stoplight has a walk/don't walk sign, when the walk sign stops flashing, the light has a few seconds before the yellow starts. Some lights actually count down the seconds to yellow.

Holy cow Jeff, you're really dating yourself, I'm in my 60's and here in Iowa we have had a green, a yellow, and a red for as long as I can remeber. I hear what your saying and I don't disagree. Between you and Pfluger and Jordan there has been a lot of good information and common sense ditributed on this forum. The point of the post was beware of this place in northeast Missouri because ifts fairly apparent that they are financing a good share of their city budget from extortion with a red light camera. My lawyer and the Missouri lawyer he contacted were law school classmates and pretty good friends. What I gathered from the conversation with my guy was that his friend thought that this city had a pretty good racket going with the red light camera and the "illegal idling" option and that the third lawyer wasn't doing so bad either.
I've got to believe my driver when he says he was well under the speed limit. He hasn't had a moving violation in over three years with us. Can't say whether he was able to tell if it was a stale green or not but I studied the video of the violation and the seven seconds on the yellow was being generous. Maybe he could have gotten stopped but what would that have done to the 35,000 pounds of live turkeys that he had in the wagon.
Why would the city kill their golden goose just because some trucker from Iowa complained?
We can "what if" til the cows come home but we have all heard about the Oklahoma speed trap towns that finance their budget with speeding tickets, this is just another form of legal extorsion and folks need to beware.