There's federal guidance for how to set up a traffic light's timing plan. This is a good start: http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop08024/
However, different jurisdictions have different techniques. The most common way I've seen in the field is to use commercial software, where you enter in the the lane configuration, traffic volumes, and vehicle turning movement counts, and it spits out a pretty good timing plan. This one is by far the most user-friendly and popular: http://www.trafficware.com/synchro.html The reason you get such poor performance at many places is because timing plans aren't maintained. A good traffic engineer goes out and counts vehicle volumes and turning movements at the intersection for a few hours every couple years and revise the timing plan. Many departments don't have the budget for this, and the timing plan is quickly outdated. Also, you're supposed to have different timing plans based on the volume you're seeing, so you'd have different timing plans for a afternoon rush hour than you would for 2AM on a Tuesday. But again, that takes more time and is not always done. Areas with a lot of congestion have much more sophisticated solutions. There's a few products out that use video detection to constantly measure vehicle volumes, and can therefore continuously update the timing plan. The goal is to idiot-proof the whole thing, and it seems to be working. We're doing a before-after analysis of this one: http://rhythmtraffic.com/index.php/insync/ I'll let you know when we publish the results. -Noah On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 5:39 PM, zgotts <[email protected]> wrote: > > Noah, any chance you have knowledge of light timing? > > I'm no expert on this, and I'm sure there's a lot of complexities to > it, but I mean.. are there not standards for this stuff? Does every > town just have their own system that they just pull out of a hat? > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Nighthawk Motorcycle Lovers!" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/nighthawk_lovers?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Nighthawk Motorcycle Lovers!" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nighthawk_lovers?hl=en.
