If Lights Are Synchronized, Why Do We Keep Stopping?

You sit idle in gridlock, fuming over your surface-street commute. Red lights shine tauntingly ahead for at least a mile, overhead on traffic signals and from the backs of cars.

It seems hopeless--unless you’re driving on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. There, almost magically, half a dozen traffic signals suddenly turn green at precisely the same moment. Within a few seconds you peel away from the pack and whiz unmolested for several minutes through a bank of smiling stoplights.

Ah, you sigh. The beauty of synchronized signals in action. Technology to soothe the savage motorist and smooth the commutes of the area’s rich and famous.

“Well, of course,” says Jennifer Smith, manager of a Santa Monica Boulevard flower shop. “It’s Beverly Hills.”

It sure is. But it might come as something of a surprise to learn that it’s also supposed to be that way in Los Angeles.

Yes, transportation officials say, the City of Angels has had a similar system in place for 20 years. All 4,000 stoplights along about 7,000 miles of road were wired back in the 1970s to realize that elusive dream: a seamless ride through the city.

It just may not be as obvious in Los Angeles as on that stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. But it’s there. Timers at every intersection regulate the flow of cars, and every 100 to 200 stoplights are hooked together to a master clock that controls signal patterns over a fairly wide radius.

In theory, motorists should come to a full stop only rarely, especially while traveling on major thoroughfares. If they stick to the speed limit, they should be able to watch the stoplights successively turn green as they approach--presto, abracadabra, open sesame.

But try telling that to Sherman Oaks stockbroker Robert Lobel. Like other motorists accustomed to heavy backups, he scoffs at the existence of a synchronization system.

“You’re telling me they are synchronized and I don’t believe it,” Lobel says. “It’s terrible. The main streets are a nightmare. I bet if you ask 100 people, 99 would say they’re not synchronized.”

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So what seems to be the problem?

Well, for one, the system is two decades old--hardly the latest technology. Equipment sometimes fails. Some stoplights are irregularly spaced or too close together, making timing difficult.

Plus, traffic flows have changed dramatically since the timing mechanisms were installed, and some intersections may not have been updated to reflect new patterns, says Anson Nordby, a senior engineer with the city Department of Transportation.

And out of a corps of 10 city engineers dedicated to traffic signal operations, only four go out and fix or adjust signals and timers throughout the entire city--a daunting task.

Most of the others are busy working with new computerized gadgetry designed to deal with another major problem that bedevils the system: plain old human unpredictability.

As everyone knows, drivers pour onto the streets at odd hours. Accidents happen. Pesky pedestrians insist on crossing the road. Maintenance crews block lanes. Spectators clog streets for concerts and sporting events. And rain ruins everything.

The current synchronization system cannot adjust to traffic conditions that fluctuate daily, even hourly. “It’s not as responsive to dynamic changes in traffic as we’d like,” Nordby says.

By the end of 1998, Nordby hopes, the current system will be obsolete, replaced by the much-vaunted $300-million ATSAC system, or Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control.

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The ATSAC system relies on video cameras and sensors embedded in the pavement to relay up-to-the-minute traffic data to a subterranean nerve center beneath City Hall. Experts there monitor the traffic and can override the computers to produce something “more elegant than what the system can come up with,” Nordby says.

ATSAC is already operating 1,500 signals; installation of another 500 is under way. The system is part of the “smart corridors” along the Santa Monica Freeway and is up and running in Downtown Los Angeles, West Los Angeles and Hollywood, around Los Angeles International Airport and along Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

Nordby says a study two years ago showed that the system cut travel time by 18% and increased speeds by 16%. More recently, ATSAC helped iron out heavy traffic flow on major surface streets after the Northridge earthquake.

But Lobel, the stockbroker, finds the new system as hard to believe in as the old one.

“I haven’t noticed it,” he says skeptically, remembering crawls along Ventura Boulevard. “You definitely stop.”

In parts of West Los Angeles and Hollywood, where ATSAC is already on line, an unscientific comparison also produced interesting results. A 1 1/2-mile stretch of Wilshire Boulevard between Barrington Avenue and Sepulveda Boulevard took an average of eight minutes to traverse during the morning rush hour; a similar drive on Sunset Boulevard between Cahuenga Boulevard and Normandie Avenue took five.

So why did an equal distance on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which uses the conventional timing method, average only four minutes?

Hard to tell without examining those intersections, Nordby says.

Perhaps Jennifer Smith is right. It’s Beverly Hills, home of the wealthy and powerful. Maybe “life in the fast lane” isn’t just a metaphor after all.