A design award has been given for a concept that would allow existing traffic li ghts to be retrofitted with

progress bars that offer a visual representation of when the light will change. Several benefits have been suggested... - Less pollution, as drivers can turn their engines off and cut carbon emissions while waiting for the green light, - Less fuel consumption, as turning off vehicle engines lowers fuel consumption in the long run, - Less stress, since drivers know exactly how long to wait, and - Safer driving, as all traffic participants are fully aware of how much time th ey have left before the light changes, reducing the chance for potential traffic accidents Analysis has shown that timers at red lights help reduce the number of accidents . Twice as many accidents occurred when timers were installed at green lights. Taiwan Institute of Transportation has analyzed 187 road sections nationwide whe re the devices are installed. Results showed that the timers at red lights had helped reduce the number of tra ffic accidents by 50 percent. They also reduced deaths and injuries by 100 percent and 52 percent respectively . Conversely, the number of accidents where countdown timers were used at green li ghts increased twofold. While the number of fatalities did not rise, the number of injuries was up by more than 30 percent. When both types of timers are installed, the number of accidents rose 19 percent and injuries 23 percent respectively.

Sitting stuck in a traffic jam, drivers have plenty of time to think. Most are l ikely preoccupied by an upcoming meeting, a child s birthday or other daily detail s. Meanwhile, fuel is being burned and CO2 and other pollutants are spit into th e atmosphere, impacting human and environmental health. The costs of this waste include the obvious personal expense and squandering of dwindling oil reserves (in the United States alone, backed-up traffic burns more than 10 billion litres of fuel per year). However, the human hours lost can als o impact a country s economic productivity, as evidenced by a report on the notori ous congestion in Bangladesh s capital that found workers there spent 3.2 million business hours stuck in their cars, biting nearly US$3 million out of the $100 m illion economy. As developing nations become ever more industrialized, these problems are set to worsen, as China s recent epic 10-day traffic jam well illustrated.

Traffic lights cycling green and red in a regular and predictable way is unneces sarily restrictive. Less orderly patterns, would be more efficient. To achieve these new less uniform patterns, the lights should be left to organiz

e themselves, by coordinating with each other! (In case you never wondered how o r why lights change when they do, traffic engineers normally set the cyclic oper ation of signals to match recent past traffic patterns e.g., lights on main road s stay green longer during peak hours). When given some simple traffic-responsive operating rules and allowed to set the ir own red-green switching, smartened traffic light systems could devise more effi cient solutions to the pressures of vehicular congestion. By monitoring the lengths of queues forming on different stretches of road, a li nked-up hive of lights works together to prevent long jams from forming. what happ ens at one set of traffic lights would influence how the others respond. The key to this new type of control is that it does not ignore natural fluctuati ons in the traffic flow by trying to impose a certain rhythm. In other words, th ere is no green wave , where one intersection after another receives a green signal , despite the lack of cars waiting. Rather, the system uses randomly appearing gaps in the flow to give the green wh ere it s needed.

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