Service Request #2: Why Is This Red Light So Damn Long?

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1:21But you're driving me because what? Because you're a passenger princess. That's exactly correct. Some people enjoy driving. Some people, like Vivian, really do not. But nobody enjoys being stuck in traffic. No one's moving. What are they doing? I want to burn the intersection to the ground and piss on the ashes. Oh my God. L.A. is famously a car town, known for its endless freeways and its soul-crushing rush hour traffic. And in a city full of bad intersections, Vivian and Cody are headed towards one that many consider to be the worst. It's where three roads, Fairfax, Olympic, and San Vicente, all intersect.

2:07I think it's technically called the Fairfax asterisk, but I like to think of it as the Devil's Three-Way because you have this weird triangle in the middle, and there are like one, two, three, four, five traffic lights. To navigate this intersection, Vivian and Cody have to make it through two traffic lights in quick succession, only a couple hundred feet apart. Oh, God. We get caught right in the middle of... Oh, no. We are stuck in the middle. They make it through one traffic light, but then get stopped at the next one. And now they're stuck right in the middle of the triangle. Oh, God. So there are...

2:49Oh, God. Oh, boy. We are in between. Oh my God.

3:03I'm Delaney Hall, and this is Service Request from 99 % Invisible and Campside Media. We rarely think about infrastructure until it breaks, and then suddenly it is all we can think about. So every week, we're diving into your burning questions about the invisible systems all around us. We're exploring how infrastructure works and how it's designed and maintained. Today, traffic lights in LA. We're looking at the system behind them, meeting the people who decide when they flip from one color to another, and trying to answer the question on every LA driver's mind. Why is this red light so damn long?

3:45Oh, you son of a bitch. Oh, you son of a bitch.

3:56The roots of L.A.'s modern traffic system go back to 1984, when the city was preparing to host the Olympic Games. L.A. was expecting more than a million visitors and thousands of athletes. traffic in LA was bad and all these people would be flooding into a city that was already pretty maxed out city leaders were worried that athletes and spectators wouldn't be able to make it to their events you're going to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and some of your friends are asking you questions aren't those freeways congested can you find your way around what about the smog At this time, all of the traffic lights in L.A.

4:42operated independently from each other. Each one had a timing mechanism that would flip the light from green to yellow to red on a regular cadence. If a traffic light broke, or if an intersection got extra congested, engineers would likely find out about it from angry phone calls. And then someone from the city would have to drive out to that intersection to manually reprogram the timing mechanism of the traffic light. In the process, they would often get stuck in the same congestion they were trying to fix. But the Olympics gave city engineers the motivation and the funding to try something new.

5:21With the games looming, a transportation official named Ed Rowei assembled a small team, and they started tinkering. And what they came up with was a network that connected 118 traffic lights around the L.A. Coliseum into a single system. For the first time, instead of sending someone out to every congested intersection, engineers could see what was happening across a whole area and then adjust signal timing remotely in real time. The system went online just before the game started. It was an experiment and it worked. This is Salita Reynolds. She's the chief innovation officer at LA Metro. And for eight years, she ran LA's traffic light system, trying to make traffic a little bit better in one of the most traffic-y cities in the world.

6:13There are a lot of other really interesting things that happened during the 84 Games to make it such a success. But if you ask anybody who was here at the time, they will say, wow, they really solved traffic. The first full day of Olympic competition saw few hurdles on the massive L.A. freeway system. The games not only avoided gridlock, but the sea breezes also cooperated. And sort of famously, when the games were over, the mayor at the time, Tom Bradley, at the closing sort of press conference said, the games are over, let the traffic begin. So, you know, there was this sort of feeling that everybody had kind of made it work for the period of the games.

6:52And now we were going to be back to our old ways. It reminds me a little of the extraordinary measures you hear every city taking, like Beijing firing particulate into the air to make the smog rain away before the crowds came for the Olympics. So it's interesting to me that in many ways it was one of these extraordinary measures that was taken to try to solve a problem temporarily for the Olympics. But then it continued. Why did it continue? I think the engineers at the time were very excited by the improvements that they had seen. And they were real and measurable. They had reduced people's delay by about 30, 35 percent, which in turn improved emissions, right, because you didn't have as many people idling because you were just moving the most efficient way possible.

7:52LA's success with traffic during the Olympics made a big impact. Cities planning future Olympics called them for advice. And in the years that followed, officials from Salt Lake City and Sydney and Beijing all wanted to study what LA's transit leaders had built. As the system continued to expand, it got even more sophisticated. with new high-tech tools that could sense the conditions on the roads and then respond automatically. Los Angeles is now trying to unsnarl its traffic by applying some very advanced technology. The city has begun to plant electronic sensors beneath major downtown intersections.

8:30Those sensors determine the speed and density of traffic and feed that information to a computer beneath City Hall. The computer analyzes the information and automatically operates traffic lights to relieve congestion and speed up traffic flow. We reduced delay at intersections by about 20%. We reduced stops by 35%. By the way, that last voice was Ed Rowe, who died in 2023. When we come back, we'll learn about how LA's traffic system has grown since the Olympics and why it is now known as the eighth wonder of the transportation world. That's after the break. Cash Now More Later from Opendoor gives you cash up front for your home plus all the profit later.

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11:19Today, it's known as ATSAC, Advanced Transportation System and Coordination, and it controls almost all of the city's 5 ,000 traffic signals. And while it would be malpractice to say that the system has solved LA's traffic issues, it has made traffic a little less bad. Believe it or not, without this system, the streets of LA would be even more clogged. The way it works is that there are sensors buried in the pavement at most intersections across the city, and they count cars as they pass. The sensors feed a constant stream of data back to a control room in downtown L.A., where engineers can watch a live map of L.A.

12:03traffic. When a street starts to back up, the system automatically responds. It can extend a green light or make one shorter, nudging timing across the whole system of intersections to help traffic flow more smoothly. And there are traffic engineers, transportation engineers and planners and other folks that are sitting in an office in downtown Los Angeles. They have hundreds of cameras that give them basically a 360 degree view of the city at any time. And they also have a landscape view of what's happening with every single transportation signal at all of the 5000 plus intersections that they're monitoring at any given time.

12:45So these various signals run into ATSAC, which I am imagining as sort of the NASA Mission Control Center. Is that what it looks like? Kind of, yes. Houston, we have our truck. It is number 128. Selena told me the ATSAC control room has become legendary among traffic nerds. and it's been featured in a couple of movies, including a 2003 heist film called The Italian Job. We're moving out. There's this scene where someone hacks into the ATSAC system to create a huge traffic jam in the middle of L.A. We're locked on. We've crashed. It's not a crash. We've got power. I can't log in. And there's a shot of the ATSAC control room in the movie with engineers holding their heads in their hands, staring at these enormous screens that show intersections across the city.

13:47They're totally freaking out as cars smash into each other and traffic descends into chaos.

13:58So in that control room, you're saying it's a mix of technology and human intervention. to make the signals change. So in some cases, there's a person pressing buttons, flipping switches, and making the lights change. They can do that in extraordinary circumstances. So when I first got to Los Angeles, there was actually a giant sinkhole that opened up in the ground over by UCLA. Less dramatic than that, there's spontaneous protests or other things happening. At that point, they're making decisions about, okay, we're going to leave this light on green for longer and clear people out of a space when they need to be redirected or rerouted.

14:41But these are mostly extraordinary circumstances. For the most part, it sounds like there are computers that are making decisions about when to flip from green to yellow. Yeah, think about the way that we're managing movement through a city, you know, we're managing it in space and time. And the space is limited, right? We have 7 ,500 miles of streets in the city of Los Angeles. So there's a lot, but we have what we have, it's fixed. So that congestion that you experience, that's too much demand for a fixed amount of space. I like this idea that traffic engineering is all about space and time, because it elevates what seems like a mundane discipline into something a little more epic.

15:32The space part is pretty simple. Basically, every car, bus, bicycle, and pedestrian is competing for the same fixed space on the roads. And the reality is that engineers cannot do much to expand that space. But they can work with time. And that's where their special algorithms come in. There is so much data collected from those sensors embedded in the pavement, and it reveals stuff like rush hour patterns and holiday surges and what a Wednesday on the road looks like versus a Sunday. And the algorithms crunch through all that information and then translate it into precisely timed traffic lights.

16:16For the most part, those algorithmic sort of calculations for how much green time one street gets versus the other and that balancing, it's pretty fixed by the time of day and the day of the week and so on and so forth. But there are moments when unpredictable things happen, and the sensors have a certain amount of intelligence, and they're able to perceive those changes and reallocate things in real time. And then sometimes the system becomes so strained that it breaks and you have to have a human in the loop to intervene and actually manage it manually. and that human needs to be connected to all of the other humans that are there to make things work.

17:00But to move this many cars and this large of a system that has this much complexity and variation, you have to have all of those things at the same time. That sounds like this increasingly sort of brain-breaking math problem, Like how you synchronize across that many signals and how you make this intersection flow smoothly without creating chaos in an intersection somewhere else. That sounds so hard. It is. And it's also we're talking about people's lives, right? That's one of the reasons why people love transportation is because it has such an immediate effect on people's lives. And so part of what you're also doing is trying to figure out the tolerance that exists across the system for delay or frustration.

17:57And so you're having to sort of consider how pain is being spread around. And you're having to sort of accept that in order to balance things, everybody has to share the pain a little bit. And you're also making a judgment call. So on the main drag, there may be, let's say, 45 ,000 or 50 ,000 people a day that are driving on that main street. On the cross streets, you have a much smaller number of people. And so you're going to privilege the greatest good for the greatest number, right? You're going to privilege the 50 ,000 people on the main line, and the people on the side streets are going to experience more pain because they're going to have to wait a little bit longer, but eventually you're going to get to go.

18:47Right. What I hear you saying is that it's collective and there's also something a bit utilitarian about it. Yeah. And that goes for everybody who's using the street, right? People biking and walking as well. If there's a bus, right, that's coming along or a train that needs to make it across the street, there's a lot more people moving much more efficiently in the train or on the bus or even on a bike taking up a lot less space, which again, is one of our most precious resources. And so figuring out how to balance safety, efficiency, delay, and the sort of quality of people's lives are all the ingredients that have to go into the creativity with which the system gets managed.

19:32Yeah, it's interesting to think about this as it's this highly engineered system, there's algorithms, there's lights, there's wires, but ultimately it is about people's time. It's actually very human. It is. I consider it as much of an art as it is a science. When we move a little white line on the street, six inches this way or six inches that way, we know that it changes how fast people drive or how they behave. And so it's a lot more about human behavior than it is about... A math equation. Yeah, exactly. When we come back, 99PI producer Vivian Lay visits the ATSAC control room. Once she's there, she hacks into the system and screws up traffic across LA in order to facilitate the movement of a huge amount of stolen gold.

20:29Just kidding. She just wants to figure out what's up with her least favorite intersection, the Fairfax asterisk. That's when we return.

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23:34Hi, good morning. Hi, good morning. The ATSAC control room is located in downtown LA. in a huge glass building around the corner from City Hall. It's a big space that looks kind of like a corporate meeting room with blue-gray carpet and a wall of glass windows where you can see traffic down below. But the main attraction is the huge block of screens that stretches across the front of the room. It displays live camera feeds of intersections across the city so that engineers can keep an eye on where congestion is building up and why it's building up. The camera showed me why it's congested. This is Eric Zambon, a transportation engineer in charge of the Atzac Center.

24:17He gave Vivian a tour last month and talked her through the big screen and what it allows the engineers to see. Is there an emergency vehicle that's blocking a lane causing congestion or is there even a crash in the middle of the intersection? And at that point, we jump on our system and we would modify signal timing parameters to best help people get around those locations. Gotcha. On that same big screen, there's also a map of every traffic signal in L.A. They show up as multicolored dots of light. So that's the graphic of all the traffic signals. Every dot is a node or a traffic signal, and that's our signal network.

25:00This shows, in real time, the status of the signals in the city. Every color represents something to us, And although it just looks like a Christmas tree to some people, it tells us the operation of the signals just at quick glance. We're looking at, you know, the layout of Los Angeles, mostly green. Could you explain to me, like, what patterns you see? When you look at this, what does this actually mean to you? OK, so green means it's online, good communication. If you're running a cycle length. Right now, we're coming up on just past the AM peak traffic period. All right. So things are starting to slow down.

25:35As Eric explained, most of the traffic lights were working well, and they were running their usual timing. As the cars start to congest, it ramps up the green time to help provide throughput to get people through that area. So these are the smartest. The ones with the pink in the middle are the smartest intersections that we operate. Could I ask you about one intersection in particular that really grinds my gears? Of course. Are you from L.A.? I am from L.A. It's pretty close to me. do you know what the fairfax asterisk is uh that's olympic fairfax san vicente yeah yeah so that was designed well before we had our current eyeballs yes it's so bad and there's nothing i can do about that we've we've viewed that through the lens of 50 60 years of traffic We have put that into traffic signal modeling software.

26:33We've done everything we can. And I hate to say this, but the confluence of three major streets during peak hours leads to nothing but frustration and signal timing can't fix it. And we just inherited that very bizarre, geometrically bizarre intersection that has traffic signals. And we have to assign right away two different streets going east-west and one going north-south. and it's proven to be a very difficult thing. I don't know that it'll get better. Do you feel like you have to kind of just do what you can with like the mess that you've been given? That's exactly how I feel, yeah. I'm only laughing because you describe what goes on in my mind every day.

27:18It's that space-time problem again, as Salida Reynolds described it. The Atzac system has improved traffic in LA. but it can't control the fundamental layout of the streets or the number of people using them. It can't control the fact that L.A. was built as one of the most car-centric cities in the world. Engineers can play with time, coaxing millions of people through various bottlenecks. But sometimes, no matter how advanced their algorithms, it's still kind of lipstick on a pig. And they're still left with something like the Fairfax asterisk. an intersection that just was not designed to handle so many cars.