For people living in most cities of China, rush hours are real disasters. You wait in an absurdly long line of cars for 90 seconds or more and the green lights just couldn’t satisfy the need of the huge traffic. Sometimes traffic congestion is extremely terrible on one direction but it’s almost empty on the other direction. If that’s the situation, giving both directions equal green-light time won’t be appropriate.
On October 31st, Traffic lights version 3.0 are officially used in Hexi district of Nanjing. They are expected to effectively change the current disturbing situation.
The traffic lights are equipped with phased array radar (PAR), which enables them to collect data like speed and volume on all directions.
Shi Wei, staff from Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Transportation said the E-W of the crossroad at Hexi Street faces extremely huge traffic volume at rush hours. The regular traffic lights can’t meet the demand of the E-W side. However, the new traffic lights will automatically prolong the green-light time at the E-W side based on the data collected. For example, the system gives 38 seconds to the left lane last time, but the radar detects more cars this time and gives 3 seconds more to the left lane.
Don’t belittle these several seconds. The daily traffic volume at those crossroads has increased by 3.58% from 9,543 cars to 9,885 cars. Moreover, the total length of the queue at 4 directions has been reduced by 23.68% from 1,651m to 1,260m.
Compared to the manual version 1.0 and pre-set version 2.0, version 3.0 lights can also receive the signals from traffic lights next to them to cooperate with them. With the spread of traffic lights version 3.0, there will be no more waste of waiting.
