No one likes being stuck in traffic. It wastes fuel, makes us angry, and the resulting rash behaviour can cause collisions and pedestrian deaths. Yet as cities expand, the problem is continuously aggravated, straining a city’s people and its infrastructure.
To better understand the challenge of reducing congestion, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has introduced ‘Midtown in Motion,’ an initiative aimed at monitoring and analyzing traffic on Manhattan streets. Thirty-two cameras will soon be deployed from Second to Sixth avenues and 42nd to 57th streets—an area of 110 square city blocks. The plan also includes the installation of one-hundred microwave sensors and twenty-three E-Z Pass readers, which will all collect realtime data on traffic volume at intersections; thus allowing operators at the traffic management center in Long Island City to play remotely with the traffic lights and turn signals.
The collected data will also be available to New York City drivers via a mobile app designed by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
No one, not even the Mayor, however, expects the system to provide a traffic magic bullet—only that it offer some relief.
“I don’t want anybody to think that there will never be another traffic jam,” Bloomberg told CBS. The Commissioner for the Department of Transportation, Janette Sadik-Khan, added that “for far too long Midtown traffic was very much like the weather. Everybody commented on it but nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it.”
The cost to implement the traffic monitoring technology is pegged at $1.6 million, which seems bargain basement if it succeeds in saving even a fraction of the billions Manhattan businesses lose to congestion delays every year. (The federal government is picking up almost a third of the tab.)
Other big cities will be watching what impact the system has on New York traffic when it goes live in 2013. Toronto, which according to studies has one of the longest average commute times in the world, should be one of them.
