Traffic lights that are red for a long time in front of a large row of cars, while an almost empty road is given the green light. You probably see it happen. TomTom thinks it has a solution.
It can be very frustrating: you are waiting at a traffic light with many others, but no one has come from the other side for a while. Wasted time. Then the lights turn green, but too short to cross all of them. You can wait another round. The quiet road then gets the green light for the same amount of time, even though hardly anyone is there. That must be smarter, right? In some cases it is already smarter, for example with sensors in the road surface that measure traffic and based on that, traffic lights run a more logical cycle. You also have the ‘green wave’, where a series of successive traffic lights turn green in such a rhythm that you can drive from intersection to intersection in one piece at the right speed. This not only saves frustration, it is also good for traffic flow and for the environment.
The downside is that installing such systems is often labor-intensive and expensive. TomTom thinks it has a solution, reports traffic network. The Dutch navigation supplier has developed ‘Junction Analytics’, a program in which vehicle data around intersections is collected and made transparent. Based on so-called floating car data modern ‘smart’ cars and smartphones can be used to control traffic lights more efficiently. Junction Analytics can be used for this by the traffic light administrators. It not only shows how much traffic there is, but also, for example, how long it waits. This will also provide a clearer picture of which traffic flows are most dominant at an intersection and when.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl