It is interesting to stop your daily routine and observe the pace at which people do business.
The broadband driven Internet supports ever higher volumes and transactions yearly than all the previous years combined. This implies a high reliance on continuous availability of that service.
The same concept applies to traffic authorities in most urbanized centers.
Motorists have come to rely on good signal coordination and supply of power that most take it for granted.
It is a well documented fact that governments have not been investing the large sums of money needed to keep the power supply in step with population growth and business demands.
Recently, Sydney in Australia has suffered a few major power disruptions in the Central Business District resulting in chaos on the roads, confusion among morning and evening commuters using the public transport system.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/keneally-under-fire-over-blackout-20100707-zzci.html
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/08/2947861.htm
This type of disruption is both a major issue for law enforcement, agencies and public transport services.
What can be done to minimize the disruption to a modern metropolis?
In sydney’s case a public address system deployed to disseminate information to large volumes of people in the city was rendered useless due to the lack of a backup power source such as a pole mounted UPS.
In the case of road traffic, the traffic signal controllers (devices) were also blacked out causing chaos in the Central Business District of Sydney, Australia.
Total gridlock was the result of no power to the intersection signals, and it is this traffic engineers opinion that governments and local authorities could invest funds in providing the Traffic Signal Controllers of the most critical intersections with integrated UPS systems that can be monitored remotely by monitoring systems such as the Adaptive SCATS Urban Traffic Control systems.
This type of system would be capable of maintaining working signals and coordination between intersections during power outages of up to 4 hours depending on loads.
Such UPS based Controllers can also be power local Public Address systems as well.
The rational is that in first world countries most power outages are brief and generally less than 2 hours, so installing Traffic Signal Controllers with UPS such as the ECUPS or ICUPS units manufactured by ATC in Sydney, Australia for 50hz or 60hz based countries, 230vac or 110vac.
ECUPS - External Controller with UPS – two cabinet solution.
ICUPS - Integrated Controller with UPS – single cabinet solution.
