Los Angeles built the largest connected traffic network of its kind. Driving its streets has never been better. Honest
Awry smile comes across Edward Yu’s face as he gingerly threads a city-owned Prius through a maze of cones in front of Los Angeles’ Nokia Theater. Traffic has been diverted so that workers can install a carpet for the next day’s People’s Choice Awards. “They put in a red carpet every day in this city,” says Yu. A bicycle zips by on the right, cars switch lanes to avoid the construction, and a passing light rail train blocks a line of drivers hoping to make a left turn. “Everyone wants a piece of the streets,” he says.
Yu is a soft-spoken engineer with great power: He sets the timing for all of LA’s stoplights. His department has to take it all in: Bikes, trains, big events and, of course, lots and lots of cars. Los Angeles has one of the nation’s worst reputations for automobile congestion, but that’s a simplistic way of looking at things. Its freeways are still the most congested in the nation, but LA has 36 times as many miles of surface streets as it does freeways.
Those streets, ranging from narrow roads winding around the Hollywood Hills to 10-lane boulevards that cut through canyons of office towers, are heavy traveled—the intersection of Sepulveda Boulevard and Venice Boulevard routinely sees 79,000 cars per day, more than many expressways—but rarely gridlocked.
This is thanks to a citywide data-gathering system that’s the largest of its type, run by Yu and his team of 35 engineers and 20 operators. The system—due to be complete early next year—is becoming ever more complicated as a city built for cars rededicates its streets to buses, trains, bicyclists and pedestrians.
Every second, 18,000 magnetic sensors embedded in Los Angeles’ roadways send traffic speed and congestion levels to a control room in a former emergency bunker four stories beneath a City Hall annex in downtown Los Angeles. A computer evaluates traffic-light timings at each of 4,114 intersections and sends out by the next second, minuscule adjustments to keep cars moving. An operator at an elevated desk in the centre of the room can summon up a real-time diagram of almost any intersection in the city.
(This story appears in the 02 March, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)