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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.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday March 06 2017, @11:38PM
I wholeheartedly agree it is about time traffic lights got smarter. Past time, really.
I've been counting incidents of useless stops, in which a traffic light stops me or other drivers for nothing. The light cycled because its timer was up or for some other reason, even though there was no traffic on the cross street. I understand they do that in case the sensor didn't detect a waiting car, but it's still annoying. Wanted an idea how badly timed traffic lights really are. And the results of my informal survey is that they're pretty bad. During times of heavier traffic, useless stops are less common and shorter, but they still happen. Late evening though, useless stops are so frequent they near equal the number of justifiably red lights. Among the worst are the lights inexplicably programmed to favor one direction with both a green and a green left turn arrow for as much as a full minute, while the other 3 directions are all red. Have too often waited at such a light, with my fellow drivers also waiting on the other two red directions, while no one came through from the only open direction.
Treating these red lights like stop signs is a sure way to get nailed by a camera or a cop. Cities may be intentionally neglectful, to provoke people to run lights so they can extract more revenue from more violations. Signs announcing that an intersection is "high enforcement" often really mean that the intersection is busy, badly designed, and badly timed, ripe for exploitation by a red light camera.
Yeah, I hit Climate Change deniers with arguments about the wastefulness of badly times traffic lights. Even if Climate Change is not real, what is there not to like about improving our traffic lights? Do they really enjoy sitting at red lights that much?