A recent visit to a major city in Asia revealed an ever demanding road using public wanting to avoid traffic congestion and looking to new technology to implement time efficient solutions such as the SCATS® Urban Traffic Control system. Here is a city of some 8 million people choking with peak period traffic morning and night.
This city also has the twin evils of long intersection cycle times and count down timers.
Both these attributes seem to contribute to an aggressive driver behaviour as they can “see” how long is left and “go for it” in an effort to avoid another “LONG” cycle to wait.
I observed drivers say on approach “A” literally use up their alloted time of some 220 seconds and then when the count down timer expired, traffic on approach “A” did not stop, they simply kept streaming through, at close spacing so as to keep blocking approach “B” who by now clearly had a “green” signal to proceed.
Followed by much verbal and aural abuse by way of honking horns, many approach “B” road users were about to crash into the tail of the “out of time” approach “A” road users. Add to this also pedestrians who want to follow approach “B” in crossing the intersection “waiting” for the tail “A” cars to clear the intersection to complete their walk.
It is this authors belief that count down timers and long cycle times are the twin evils of traffic control as they seem to ellicit a behaviour of intollerance to the traffic signals and abuse of the count down timer as presence in the intersection constitutes “ownership” of that crossing.
Using such adaptive traffic control systems such as SCATS® and adaptive Traffic Signal Controllers such as the ATSC4 – SCATS compliant Controllers can alleviate this problem automatically without manual intervention.
In many countries where SCATS is used in conjunction with the ATSC4 Controller or SID device in conjunction with the local supplier’s controller can yield better traffic management results and avoid this driver behaviour and adapting with the local changing conditions.
Traffic Engineer's Blog 