A bright idea for easing traffic

Tweaking traffic-light timing to ease urban congestion and cut engine idling is one of the oldest, cheapest fuel-saving tricks in the book – a great idea for a nation laboring with $4 a gallon gasoline.

The problem is that the United States is not very good at it. Last year, a national “traffic signal report” gave the nation a “D” for the timing of its 250,000 intersection stop lights.

But Byungkyu Park wants to overhaul the system, using 21st-century timing methods that could save the US more than a billion gallons of gas a year. By applying raw computer horsepower and clever new algorithms to the old problem of “traffic signal optimization,” Dr. Park and his University of Virginia engineering team may have found a way to save more gas than all of the hybrids on the road today.

Most computer models today treat traffic flow as if it had the relatively uniform dynamics of a stream of water – all cars moving at about the same rate from intersection to intersection. But Park explains that traffic lights can be synchronized more precisely if traffic flow is calibrated on a “micro” rather than “macro” level – that is, on the number of individual cars and trucks on the road at a given time. That makes for a huge computational challenge, but also opens the door to more accurate computers models that mirror real-world traffic flows to a far greater degree.

“To solve this problem, we realized we should look into the individual vehicle level [and] understand individual human driving behavior,” Park says. “We are using a high-fidelity computer model to deal with individual driving behavior to create a microscopic traffic simulation program that models basically every single vehicle in the system.”

Park’s model allows for different driving styles that impede or change the flow of traffic. They include aggressive drivers that zoom ahead of the pack, lane changers, and slow-rolling truckers. His goal: to optimize light timing so erratic traffic ends up moving uniformly “like a train.”

To do that, however, would require taking special note of that bane of traffic regulators – the left-hand turn. Lights that hold left-hand turn lanes at a standstill too long can lead to long backups that impede traffic in other lanes, a common problem. His system would vary the length of left-turn lane signals to suit traffic conditions, allowing enough time for enough motorists to get through to prevent backups.

Even when signals are set to let drivers get where they are going as quickly as possible, that often does not save on gas and emissions, Park says. More tightly optimized signals, he found, often produced a trade-off that might delay travel “a few seconds,” but yield greater fuel savings and emissions reductions.

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