Traffic Light Philosophy

I was reading about the introduction of traffic signals. The first set were basically manually operated semaphore arms outside of the Houses of Parliament. The interesting point here is that they were manually operated! Somebody with a brain could decide to let more important traffic through or to leave one direction 'green' for a bit longer just to let that last car through. The one thing that made this invention useful was the first to be removed. As soon as you take away the intelligence, the lights become an obstruction. Up until they were made automatic, they were merely the extension of someones arms, now they are robotic tentacles.
One of the knock-on effects is the much less than perfect 'intelligence' that these systems have or can have. Even in the newest systems, the connections to road sensors and adjacent sets of lights are minimal and the decisions they make are by definition a compromise. What is worse, it is almost impossible to determine if a set of lights is working as designed since the designs range from the annoying to the downright confusing.
There is also a pair of graph curves, I'm sure, that would dictate why traffic lights are no longer fit for purpose, certainly in the way we use them in the UK. One curve shows that one set of lights can help a single junction because it causes little interference for the control that it brings. It can appear to be a workable solution and we might have to concede that it is better than nothing in any given area (most of our roads are pre-traffic lights and less than ideally laid out). What happens however is that as the number of sets of lights increases, the number of interference patterns increases and this is where at some point, extra lights produces more congestion rather than less. I fear in many towns, this point has already been reached and most of us have seen better traffic flow at broken traffic lights - and amazingly not hundreds of people waiting to cross the road fearing they would be killed by traffic.
Who gets to make the decision though? Who sits in their office and decides that another set of lights is the way to go? A local community group? A Health & Safety Working Group (you can't argue that lights make it safer to cross a road - but at what cost and how much safer?) a council department? Or most likely the whole lot of non-experts who are not clever enough to realise the knock-on effect of their decision. Worse still, a government agency making decisions about areas they don't even live or work in i.e. zero punishment for any bad decisions. There must be something majorly wrong when you see some of our prize examples of traffic light extravaganzas (e.g. Cheltenham Ring Road).
The work for shared space has already been researched and trialled in Holland and shown to cut accidents (and costs!), are we brave enough to follow suit and cut up our out-dated industrialised and very expensive traffic systems for something entirely more civilized? I don't like waiting at a red light for 1 minute 20 seconds on a dual carriageway after being stopped by the previous set of red lights and therefore making this set think there was no traffic!