Synchronizing downtown traffic signals
In today's Chronicle story on Metro's belabored traffic light-linking system there is this paragraph about Mayor White's plan to synchronize Houston traffic lights:
After his election a year ago, Mayor Bill White made it clear he wasn't going to wait for Metro to complete the RCTSS [Regional Computerized Traffic Signal System] before putting some of its components to work. The mayor's first initiative after taking office in January was laying out a yearlong effort for public works to manually program more than 1,500 traffic signals, including many of the computerized controllers that are part of the RCTSS. Houston is spending $3 million for this — work that would have been done mostly at TranStar had the RCTSS been up and running.
But there is one section of Houston that will not have synchronized traffic lights, in the same way the rest of the city does, as a we learned from Lucas Wall's Move It! column last week when he responded to this question:
Q: The traffic signals downtown are still a joke. They all turn green (or red) at once! On Austin Street, for example, all the lights from south to north in downtown turn green at once. The objective (I suppose) is to go as fast as you can to make as many lights as you can. When are they going to fix this?
— David Kester, Houston
A: The traffic signals downtown are synchronized, meaning the lights on north-south and east-west streets change at the same time. This is by design, said Wes Johnson, spokesman for the Department of Public Works and Engineering.
In other parts of the city, public works has been sequencing the traffic signals. Sequenced signals turn green as traffic rolls along the major street, meaning a motorist traveling the set speed (usually the limit or 5 mph under) won't usually have to stop.
The city has agreed with the Metropolitan Transit Authority that the Main Street light rail line is the most important aspect of downtown signal timing. Trains receive priority at intersections and the system is designed so that they should not have to stop between stations. This makes sequencing downtown lights impractical, Johnson said.
In other words, Mr. Kester, it is fixed.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 12/19/04 08:13 AM | Print |
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