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posted by mrpg on Monday March 06 2017, @02:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the honk-honk dept.

Ann Arbor plays home to the University of Michigan, and with the football games, Kid Rock concerts, and daily commuters comes traffic, and lots of it. On the average weekday, the 125,000-person town swells to hold 200,000 people, most of whom travel in by personal car. The city is exploring buses, commuter rail, and carpool options to clear up its roads, but knows it can't drive the car out of its home state anytime soon. So it turned to tech to manage its streets.

Intelligent traffic systems have been adjusting traffic lights and signs to smooth out congestion in real time for more than three decades, all over the world. More than 100 cities, including London, Santiago, and Toronto, use the same car-corralling program as Ann Arbor.

Now, that tech is getting smarter—and it's winning the battle. New numbers from Siemens, which co-owns the Ann Arbor program with UK company Imtech, show the city's more advanced software puts a serious dent in local traffic.

Cities program your standard traffic light by observing traffic patterns for a few hours, extrapolating what local vehicles need, and then letting lights do their thing for years, even decades. More advanced systems will be able to sense if a vehicle is stopped, and turn the light green to help it along. The most advanced systems—like Ann Arbor's—will know how many vehicles are stopped, in which lane, and how many vehicles are coming down the pike.


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  • (Score: 1) by DavePolaschek on Monday March 06 2017, @05:37PM

    by DavePolaschek (6129) on Monday March 06 2017, @05:37PM (#475697) Homepage Journal

    The sensor at the red light nearest my house does not sense motorcycles or Smart cars unless they're perfectly placed (I ponder going to mark the intersection with white paint some evening, but that would be unlawful). Luckily, MN has a law which allows you to proceed through the light after waiting long enough for it to have run through a complete cycle (though the light won't cycle at all if it doesn't detect you - chicken, meet egg).

    Or if you're in a hurry, get off, walk over to the pole, and press the button for the crosswalk, which also gets cars and cycles a green light.