WIRED | March 2017
Big Blue picks green over red.
For all the mishegas about self-driving cars in the sunny, techie Silicon Valley, the future of the automobile may still live in a colder clime. At least, the Wolverine State hasn’t loosened its grip on the future of traffic.
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.
then that’s the moment you can expect to see someone intervene and release the system, and allow it to respond over a wider range of parameters,” says Luke Liu, a traffic engineer who manages the city’s signal system.
The tech’s just getting going. Ann Arbor says advanced traffic control systems are but a small part of a larger connected vehicle scheme. Lights that can talk to each other can also talk to cars, warning them if they’re about to hit a red light (“Slow down!) or if a red is about to turn green (“don’t bother slowing down”).
“We want to provide an environment for researchers to come up with technology that can serve not just [private] vehicles, but also public vehicles, and pedestrians, and cyclists,” says Liu. The city, the University of Michigan, and the US Department of Transportation are in the middle of a study that looks at how connectivity can make stuff move faster.
Of course, all this may prove little more than a band-aid. Geometry says there are only so many ways to fit a bunch of vehicles on to streets. The best way to beat traffic is to not be part of traffic at all. It’s by moving people onto transit (a regional commuter rail plan is hogtied by funding woes and general intransigence), or carpools, or making it easier to walk and bicycle. In the meantime, though, computers are pretty cool.
” People kind of freak out if the signal is really different from yesterday or different from what it was five years ago. “
Richard Wallace, Center for Automotive Research
