
To Fight Gridlock, Los Angeles Synchronizes Every Red Light - olegious
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/us/to-fight-gridlock-los-angeles-synchronizes-every-red-light.html?hp&_r=0
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cletus
New York City clearly uses a similar system if you've spent any time in
Manhattan at all.

North of 14th Street the city is almost entirely on a grid (Broadway runs
diagonal and there are a couple of other exceptions). This has, at least from
my observations, had three distinct advantages:

1\. Building subways has been relatively easy (a lot were built by digging
long straight tunnels and building the avenue over them);

2\. Almost all streets are one-way, which greatly simplifies lights. A lot of
cities have gone away from one-way streets because it "confuses" drivers
despite it being clearly better; and

3\. The lights are synchronized.

Now not all city's have NYC's regularity but the Manhattan grid has to go down
as one of the greatest forethoughts in urban planning ever (IMHO).

Anyway, it's interesting to see this work so well in cities that are less
regular.

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DannoHung
And yet getting across town is still a pain and a half.

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pavel_lishin
I was about to respond with a knee-jerk "Try it in Dallas around 5:30pm, or in
Austin any time between 3pm and 6pm", but I guess it's all subjective.

I'd rather spend 45 minutes standing up in the subway, free to zone out or
read a book, rather than 30 minutes stuck in stop-and-go traffic. (And
definitely rather than 2 hours stuck in the same traffic.)

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rdouble
I think he meant getting "crosstown" meaning going east to west or vice versa.
This requires taking one of 3 subways, a bus, taxi or walking. It _is_ a pain
compared to the myriad of ways to get north and south.

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pavel_lishin
Oh, right. Yeah - I live on the west-most side of Harlem, and I'm basically
resigning myself to never seeing any of my friends on the Upper East Side.

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seanmcdirmid
Next step: all cars are driven automatically and completely synchronized
within the city. The capacity gains we could achieve would be astronomical,
while parking would become a thing of the past (just treat them like taxis).

I'm very excited about what cities will look like in the future!

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StavrosK
Sometimes I like to imagine what the world would be like if we could have
portals. Imagine a door with a keypad, you dial the number of the door you
want to connect to, the other end authorizes it and you get portals between
the two. Tourism would instantly stop existing, because everyone would live
everywhere. The super market would be, literally, next door. The post office
would stop existing, Amazon deliveries would be next-second. You might not
even need stuff, just pool them with your friends in a shared storage locker
for all of you to use.

It'd be amazing.

~~~
anigbrowl
You need to read _The Stars My Destination_ by Alfred Bester.

~~~
r00fus
The Hyperion series by Dan Simmons also had a great envisioning of the use of
portals (multidimensional houses, the endless river) and a secret downside.

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thrownaway2424
How does one synchronize every light? Imagining a grid, I can think of how
every 1-way northbound and southbound street can be individually synchronized,
but then in my imagination the east and west streets are befucked. So how does
it actually work? And how do you synchronize a 2-way street?

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moocow01
Id imagine that you are attempting to move cars down every street in "waves".
It almost might be more helpful to think of it as a series of trains on each
street. You likely can stagger the trains going north to south as well as the
trains going east to west so that they miss each other. Its probably more
complex than this but I'd imagine this is the basic concept.

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thatcherclay
This is great - wish the government would go the next step and open up the
traffic optimization to the general tech/data community to help. Think of
Netflix recommendation challenge, but helping millions of people cut down on
their commute.

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gamblor956
Quite effectively, too. My average commute is now 10 minutes less each way.
The difference after they got every light into the system was immediately
noticeable.

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melling
Average speed has increased to 30mph? Sure, it sounds like a great system, but
wouldn't it be even more helpful to have a few hundred miles of subway/rail?
LA seems to be expanding but for city of that size, it should probably have
more rail than NYC.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Rail_(Los_Angeles_County)>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway>

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theatrus2
The density of LA is still far too low for a NY style subway to be cost
effective. Metro Rail is in some ways pseudo-inter-city-commuter-rail, similar
to BART and the DC "Metro". Its also interesting due to its diverse type of
trackae (heavy and light rail).

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rayiner
The density of the LA metro area is slightly higher than that of the NYC metro
area.

The problem is vision: namely nobody has any. The folks who built NYC at the
turn of the century had vision. They didn't just put in subway lines, they put
in mostly four-track subway lines with room for express trains. They didn't
just build commuter rail, they built a vast system (again with a lot of four-
track to accommodate express trains) with stations in numerous little
Westchester and Long Island town. Oh, and it was electrified in 1903 (kudos to
Tesla, but all-electric commuting is very turn of the 20th century stuff).

Over 100 years later, we're still using that infrastructure. Today, of the 1.6
million people that enter Manhattan every day for work, 80% ride either
commuter rail or the subway. This is a movement of people that would
absolutely crush any other city despite their extensive highway networks, but
New York handles it very well using ancient infrastructure.

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jessriedel
FYI: all this visionary track was built largely by...wait for it...for-profit
companies running competing tracks. The city socialized the subway in 1940.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Su...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Subway#Unification_and_contraction)

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dmnd
This is offtopic, but it caught my eye.

> President Obama’s visit here in August 2010, for example, forced the closing
> of a major thoroughfare, unleashing gridlock on the entire west side of the
> city.

Is it really necessary for the passage of one person to cause so much delay
for everyone else? Why would a thoroughfare close for the president, anyway?
Security?

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ricardobeat
Yup. It's amazing how a small interruption (or even closing a single lane) in
a crossing can snowball into huge traffic jams.

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NathanKP
I agree it would be nice if this was open sourced, but I think the biggest
barrier most cities would face stopping them from implementing a similar
system would be the colossal hardware costs, not the software.

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salem
Fact Check: "the first major metropolis in the world to do so" N.S.W.
Australia has had a coordinated traffic system since the 60's, lights have
been coordinated across Sydney for decades. They may not be synchronized to
the extreme that LA's system could be, since Sydney doesn't have such as
massive grid of streets, but there is a system wi view of state.
<http://www.scats.com.au/product_history.html>

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jessriedel
Slow down, mate. New York City's lights have been synchronized for years too,
and I doubt the NY Times missed that. The first part of the sentence you quote
contains the key detail: "Los Angeles has synchronized _every one_ of its
4,500 traffic signals across 469 square miles..."

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salem
OK sure, for all of NSW it's 3700+ intersections [1] (for a state with about
half the population of LA), and 11000 across Australia [2] (about double the
population of LA) with the same technology.

I can't find any reference that mentions every single intersection being
hooked up, so I'll cede that one.

A very large grid might be a pathological case where it makes sense to hook up
every single intersection, but in terms of scale, it is not unique or ahead of
it's time, like the SCATS system was.

[1] <http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/usingroads/scats/index.html> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scats>

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jessriedel
I think it's just a case of the journalist defining the category to assure the
subject of the story would be the sole qualifier.

Thanks for the intro links to SCATS. I hadn't known about it.

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chrsstrm
The real issue here is the queue of cars waiting to get on the freeway. Any
street that crosses a major freeway and offers an onramp can be backed up for
miles in both directions. Synchronized lights may help with purely street-
level congestion, but increasing throughput on the freeways is what will
really clear the streets. I've clocked travel times of anywhere from 1-1.5
hours to go 8 miles, and all of the wait was due to congestion at the onramp.

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bprater
You have to wonder why they are using magnetic strips -- in an era with tons
of computing power, video would make more sense. Especially with a $400mm
investment!

Not only could a human agent watch the street from a command post, but
computers could make decisions based on what people are currently doing in
their cars down the street.

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gcr
I disagree. What advantage would video provide over magnetic strips?

Magnetic strips are (likely):

\- Cheaper than setting up and powering video cameras

\- Resistent to harsh conditions (eg. good luck hiring someone to go around
town and wiping all the foggy camera lenses during a rainstorm)

\- Likely to last longer than a video sensor

\- Probably more accurate than video, too

\- Doesn't need a huge computing infrastructure to monitor and interpret

\- Respects pedestrians' privacy more

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sixothree
My city has the exact opposite. The signal lights have antennas and
communicate with one another, but it only guarantees that a pack of cars
leaving one light will always sit through the entire duration of the next
light.

It's horribly inefficient, which is one reason I suspect it is like this - gas
taxes.

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mmanfrin
SF does this with the Fell/Oak one-way avenues. I _absolutely love_ them, with
the exception of when people stop in one of the three lanes to try to park,
which gums up the entire system.

