On the Move : Traffic Engineers Have Given the Green Light to Technology, Letting Specialized Computers Control the Flow of Motorists on Orange County’s Streets, but Coordination Among Cities--Including Synchronizing Lights--Still Has a Long Way to Go

Every weekday, 60,000 cars rumble down Harbor Boulevard, past Disneyland, past the gaudy motels and on to the intersection with Katella Avenue, rhythmically filling and emptying the crossroads like a heart.

Through a video camera perched on a light pole, James M. Paral considers the minuet of the cars from a windowless room several miles away.

He sits before a semicircular bank of computer terminals and faces a wall of eight video screens in the control room on the fifth floor of City Hall. On each screen, cars dart fitfully through an intersection.

With a few quick strokes of a computer keyboard, Paral can smooth the flow of the traffic--or send it into cardiac arrest, snarling streets for miles.

Most of the time, the chairs in front of the terminals are empty; this $10-million system is run by a big mainframe computer one floor down. Once a second, smaller computers in the field tell it how many cars are out there and whether all the lights at the 200 intersections around the city are working. In the same blink of an eye, the big computer then tells them what to do.

Humans are usually unnecessary, unless there’s a big event--a Rams football game, say, at Anaheim Stadium--that jolts the traffic out of its usual patterns.

Then the operators take over, stretching the green lights on the main streets so that sometimes it takes nearly four minutes for a light to run through its cycle, fiddling with the system until the traffic flows smoothly again.

Traffic jams are nothing new. The streets of ancient Rome got so snarled that Julius Caesar banned carts and chariots in the daytime.

But it’s only in the last 30 years that computers have been used to tame the rivers of traffic that course through urban areas.

Computers can now count cars at intersections and use the numbers to time the stoplights. Sensors tell a roadside computer to hold the green light a few seconds longer because a car is coming. The computers can even alert a human if any part of the system goes down.

It’s not surprising, then, that Southern California--with some of the nation’s worst traffic--should be home to some of the nation’s biggest makers of computerized traffic lights.

Making stoplights was still a pokey little business until a couple of years ago, when the federal government decided to dump hundreds of millions of dollars into futuristic stuff like “smart highways” that can keep track of each car.

The machines have gotten a lot smarter.

One of these--a small, Compaq personal computer--sits on a folding table that looks as though it might have come from a church potluck. But with it, Trammel Hartzog can sit in a small Santa Ana room and keep track of every traffic light in half a dozen small cities from Lake Elsinore to Glendora.

Hartzog started out in traffic engineering 27 years ago counting cars at intersections; he likes to time traffic signals when visiting a new town. He sees traffic as one might an unruly child. “It’s a challenge,” says Hartzog, a burly guy in an engineer’s short-sleeved white shirt, “to get something working as efficiently as possible.”

His sophisticated systems, like those in Anaheim, pretty much run themselves. But more of their computerized “brains” are dispersed out in the little roadside aluminum cabinets instead of in a big, central mainframe computer that small cities don’t need and can’t afford.

Hartzog only needs to glance occasionally at the personal computer to keep track of every traffic light. The engineering firm he works for--San Diego’s BSI Consultants Inc.--charges the cities a fee for his services.

Next to the computer is what looks like an oversized bedside digital clock, hooked to a wire antenna. The antenna picks up a signal from Ft. Collins, Colo., that tells the computer what time it is in Coordinated Universal Time, traditionally known as Greenwich Mean Time.

The clock marks every second with a dull electronic bong. At precisely each minute a man’s recorded voice intones the time.

Every night at half past midnight, Hartzog’s personal computer calls up another small computer in a roadside metal cabinet on a sidewalk in Los Alamitos and tells it the correct time.

That computer runs 16 stoplights on Katella Avenue in Los Alamitos, Cypress and Stanton.

That’s how traffic lights are synchronized to the split second: A driver should--in theory, at least--whiz along Katella without hitting a red light.

But synchronization isn’t quite that simple. Traffic rarely is.

To synchronize the lights on a 12-mile stretch of Katella Avenue from Anaheim to the Los Angeles County line, five cities and the state had to agree on a long list of items, right down to who would be liable should a light malfunction and cause a crash.

Different cities have different ideas about how traffic should behave; yet to perfectly coordinate the entire 12 miles, each light would have to be on the same 130-second cycle as the one at Harbor and Katella.

At the other end of Katella, where traffic is generally lighter, the cities of Los Alamitos and Cypress can’t handle 130 seconds; their left turn lanes aren’t long enough to stack all the cars that would have to wait for a green light. They compromised on a cycle that’s 10 seconds shorter for their lights, so the coordination is now slightly off from one end of Katella to the other.

And some cities’ traffic computers can’t talk to other cities’ because the manufacturers don’t like sharing their technology. And they want to sell an entire system; they don’t want a city spreading its purchases over several manufacturers.

That’s where Coordinated Universal Time comes in. Even though the computers refuse to speak to each other, if their traffic lights are all set to run on the same time, they should remain synchronized.

Southern California’s cities have only recently begun coordinating traffic flow. The Katella project, for instance, is just two years old.

Some of the equipment used on Katella Avenue didn’t have to travel far to get there. A few miles away, there’s a drab neighborhood of factories and warehouses that could be called the “Stoplight Capital of America.”

Waiting to be shipped, the traffic lights in one of these factories are stacked 12 feet high: hundreds of blind eyes, each the size of a big dinner plate. West Coast cities prefer the housings for the lights dark green; the East Coast prefers yellow. Nobody knows why: It’s just always been that way.

Just down the block from this plant, which is owned by Econolite Control Products, is Traconex/Multisonics. Twenty-three years ago, a salesman walked out of Econolite--one of the oldest and biggest stoplight makers in the world--and started Traconex, which is short for Traffic Controls of Excellence, and which is now nearly as big.

Until two years ago, Econolite still made the old mechanical lights used in American cities from the 1920s. Econolite engineers called them “clunka-clunkas”--the noise the machine’s innards made when switching signals. They went mostly to Latin America.

Now everything it makes is operated by computers. In one corner of the factory are the curbside cabinets--one to an intersection--that run the lights. Thick black ropy cables spill from one of the disemboweled cabinets. A woman in jeans and a T-shirt hooks them up to a controller, a bread-box-sized, dull blue machine--the brains that tell the lights at each intersection when to go on and off.

Near it is another box the size of a dictionary called a conflict monitor. Should the controller have a nervous breakdown and give everybody a green light at once, the conflict monitor shuts off the controller and the lights begin flashing red.

It costs $80,000 to equip an intersection with lights, controller an sensors. But there aren’t enough intersections in America to make this a big business. It is an industry of small companies that sell a total of only $110 million worth of equipment a year--about the same as eight F-16 Air Force fighters.

But all that’s about to change. Since the federal government cut its defense budget, Southern California’s huge military contractors have been scrambling to turn all the stuff they make for aiming missiles or locating submarines into something civilians will buy.

Then two years ago, Congress passed the Federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, or “Iced Tea”: $100 billion for streets and highways, the kind of money that gets even big companies’ attention.

One of the giants, Hughes Aircraft Co., has a deal with tiny Econolite: Hughes uses its expertise in guided missiles to replace the sensors that lie under the pavement near traffic lights.

These sensors are merely copper wires laid in half-inch-deep circular trenches cut in the roadbed and then covered with black epoxy glue. The sensors alert the controller to cars passing overhead. If they don’t detect any cars in their lane, the controller shuts off that green light early and turns on the one for cars waiting on the cross street.

Hughes and Econolite want to do is replace these wire loops with far more sophisticated video cameras.

Using Hughes technology that helps its missiles find and identify targets, the cameras not only sense and count cars--as the loops do--but identify and read license plates too. Say you’re a regular commuter on a toll road; the cameras could read your license number and then tell a computer to debit your account. And you wouldn’t have to stop and throw change at a toll booth. Or a camera mounted outside a tunnel could detect those hazardous materials stickers on trucks and bar their way.

This stuff comes with its own buzz words too: “Intelligent Vehicle/Highway Systems,” or IVHS. What we’re talking about, basically, is the road of the future.

The idea behind IVHS: That “we can no longer lay enough cement and build enough roads to handle all our traffic,” says Floyd Smoller of Hughes Missile Systems. “We have to use technology to manage it.”

The market for all that snazzy new equipment, says Smoller, “could well be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Soon you’ll be able to see a slice of the future on a 13-mile stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway between downtown and West L.A.

It’s called a “smart corridor,” and it’s the first time anyone in Southern California has tried to make a freeway and the streets around it work together to move traffic better.

If the freeway is tied in knots, flashing signs will tell drivers to get off and use the big streets that run parallel, like Olympic and Pico boulevards.

Street lights there are being synchronized for smoother sailing. If the freeway is jammed and the flashing signs are telling drivers to get off, those parallel streets will get longer green lights to keep their cars moving. If the streets are clogged, signs will advise drivers to get on the freeway.

Sensors will count how many cars are on the road and video cameras will show the accidents and bottlenecks so that police and emergency crews can rush there.

This tidal wave of information will go into something called an expert computer system. The system mimics human thought processes in some ways. For instance, traffic engineers were interviewed and the information added to the programming; the computer can use their experience to instantly analyze all this information, way too much for a human to assimilate so rapidly.

To human operators in a control room on the second floor of the Caltrans building in downtown Los Angeles, the computer will recommend where to shift traffic or how to time the freeway ramps to keep traffic flowing safely.

The $40 million system goes on line next year. If it works, other freeways will get the same treatment.

It had better work. For at the rate we’re going, according to local planners, a strong athlete will be able to run to work nearly as fast as driving by the year 2010.

That’s because the average speed will be 11 m.p.h.