The rules for traffic lights say that if it's amber, you must stop unless doing so would cause a collision to your rear. If you notice, when the light goes red to you, all traffic stops for about 3 seconds before any other light goes green.
The way to escape Spacey's "one second in the red" is to always consider that a green light is 'stale' and could change to amber while you are within stopping distance. By the way, on a level road, typical of urban street, a stop with fully locked wheels from 60 kph takes about 16 metres, plus about 24 metres reaction time. I'll ignore ABS and call the 16 metres the worst case scenario. Thererefore, if you are within 40 metres of the stop line when the light changes to amber, you can continue on. Further than that, start stopping.