Dumb traffic lights…

The Indian city of Bangalore, subject to traffic jams that have turned it into living hell, has launched Gridlock Hackathon, a competition for developers and technology companies promoted by the Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart to find solutions to the problem. Although the prize is equivalent to only about $ 5,500, the idea has attracted contestants of all kinds, from local technology companies with a direct interest in reducing traffic jams like Ola Cabs, to giants like Microsoft, Google or Amazon.

Among the proposals are flying cars and tunnels, along with more logical and obvious solutions such as using algorithms to more efficiently control traffic lights.

How much time do you spend sitting at a traffic light? The first traffic light, fitted with gas lights and installed outside London’s Houses of Parliament, began operations on December 9, 1868. But on January 2, 1869, less than a month after its installation, it exploded due to a gas leak causing serious burns to the policeman who operated it manually.

Since then, the technology behind traffic lights in the vast majority of cities has evolved very little: the lights are no longer gas, they are increasingly LED, and are no longer overseen by a policeman, and instead are turned on and off at scheduled intervals. But essentially, they lack intelligence, and at most have a pair of cycles, one diurnal and one nocturnal. The use of smart traffic lights, in general, is limited to gauging the speed of approaching vehicles and advising them to slow down.

Currently available technology could easily assess the volume of traffic on a road, compare it with others that cross it, and see if there are pedestrians waiting to cross. Simply by providing a minimum of intelligence to traffic lights and connecting them to each other, we could drastically improve traffic flow compared to the absurd system we currently have, which is limited to switching on and off at preset intervals and, at most, sending police officers to manually override them when congestion at an intersection or zone reaches a certain level. Using sensors on roads to assess traffic levels is not particularly complicated or expensive, and algorithms that evaluate traffic volume and could make decisions would not be difficult to develop. In fact, such systems already exist, such as that used by Waze, acquired by Google in 2013, which calculates traffic based on the location and speed data users of the app send, and that is capable of elaborating remarkably accurate and detailed maps. We are not talking here about huge projects requiring expensive infrastructure, and instead simply using readily available technology.

The potential of this kind of technology is huge, especially considering that we are approaching the age of the connected and autonomous vehicle, which would generate vast amounts of data through sensors and communication systems that would interact with traffic light networks using V2I systems, Vehicle-to-Infrastructure. We could give priority to public transport to encourage its use, manage popular routes according to traffic density. And yet we find ourselves, day after day, sitting in our cars, waiting for the stupid traffic light to change when there may well be no traffic crossing our path.

We love to talk about smart cities, but one of the things that really dictates life in a city, traffic lights, use 150-year-old technology. The replacement technology is here, but we continue to endure needless traffic jams.

Is there a city hall out there able to apply some common sense to this problem?

(En espa?ol, aquí)