Tech initiatives to save 'green time'

Tech initiatives to save 'green time'
Nandini Chandrashekar, Bangalore, DH News Service:
The city traffic police is going full throttle with implementation of tech initiatives to ease traffic congestion...

Automation, like installation of traffic lights, is the mantra of this initiative. However, the concept, taken up with the objective of ensuring orderly traffic without the presence of policemen at every junction is yet to gain ground as jumping signals is one of the most common traffic violations.

The focus is now on ‘saving on green time,’ that is, utilising every minute on roads by cutting on green time at a signal, when there are no vehicles on that side. By the end of this month, 163 traffic light junctions out of 299, will be connected to a centralised traffic management system, and will have data loaded about the length of time for a green signal, depending on the time of the day.

Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Praveen Sood said that the plan has been designed after studying the vehicular traffic at each of these junctions. Since vehicle density varies with time and day, the idea is to adjust the time of the green light accordingly.


While Sood is very optimistic about the success of this idea, he himself outlined how the earlier attempt to place detector loops below the road to detect vehicular presence at traffic junctions, turned out impractical, because of the quality of the roads.

“The loops are sensor-based and are placed 6 cms below the surface of the white line at the traffic junction to detect the presence of vehicles on the road. If no vehicle is detected for four seconds, then the lights change to red.”

The poor quality of the roads, scraped the tar off the road and damaged the sensors. The idea now is to try out virtual sensors - overhead cameras doing the same job. The first one will be ready in a month’s time.

One-ways, underpasses, road widening, rotary junctions, automated signals - Bangaloreans are being subjected to a lot of experimentation in the name of decongestion.

The outcome of the all these measures and their bearing smooth traffic flow is yet to be seen.