I have a different opinion. While this may seem plausible for roads with few traffic signals, it may cause issues in stretches of roads where the traffic signals are too many and too close by. Longer waits at one signal causes a waterfall effect and traffic piles up at the preceding intersection causing more pile-ups. In this situation, i.e in most busy areas in cities, the best possible solution is to move the traffic in pockets.

To step back, what causes the slow movement of traffic? If the first vehicle where to accelerate quick enough, there is no reason why the ones behind will not. The reason the first vehicle cannot do this is vehicles at the "just-turned-red" end are frantically trying to jump signals, as legitimately as possible (oxymoronic, I know). If this were to be brought in control, my view is moving them in small pockets, in busy junctions, is a better approach.

Will sign off with the ants modus-operandi. One almost always follows the other until the first one encounters yet another ant in the opposite direction and waits for, what the heck, a quick chat. This stops every other ant in that line (quiet marvellous I think). If the opposite ant wasn’t there in the first place, the ants wouldn’t have piled-up.

My two cents.

Well said, Nagendra. Should absolutely take into account the upstream and downstream flow. If signals are too close, small batches are the better bet.

Regards,

VK

Hi,

I would think rather than have the traffic at one direction move till it attains a speed of 30 kmph which may be about 8 to 10 mins and then let the next direction traffic move, a smaller batch size may actually be more beneficial in this case:

1. The speed is not only a factor of time but other parameters like vehicle size, road condition the distance from the next junction etc. These are possibly muri which can be removed (but given the condition in our country its not very likely to be)

2. Longer waiting at signals tempts the ones getting the red light to break the signal as he has to wait a while before he can move.

3. Long waiting traffic at the signal creates a situation akin to dust settlement in a pipe line thus congestion. Typically in a traffic, the bikes and rickshaw would wind their way in front through the gaps between vehicles when the signal is red and move up. When it turns green, these vehicles do not have the required power (especially ricks) to move fast thus the inertia.

4. The ideal example of small batch size can be seen in round abouts abroad. The batch size is two or three and they pick up speed almost instantaneously.

The main disadvantage is that the net gas consumption would be higher as all the vehicles would have their engines on most of the time.

Hi Guest,

Thanks for bringing more views. The discussion I started was specifically about manually controlled traffic in a high density peak traffic situation. It is here that one has to wait and the situation creates a valid challenge. Point 2 raised by you does not apply. Point 3 suggests that traffic shall continue to crawl if you have small batches. Point 4 does not apply to the situation. Kindly review your response.

Hi VK,

 

Wonderful thoughts, My views with respect to lean treatment to this issue would be to understand that traffic acceptable delays are Voice of Customer limits, and what traffic actual delays are process control limits. this upper control limit is directly proportional to the volume of traffic Vs bandwidth (lanes) available for the traffic to flow. so basically this is to do with Capacity of a process. you cannot produce enough and fast enough than the allowable tolerances for control process limits.

so same signal seems to be working fine with less volume of traffic and lower bandwidth and it tends to get out of control with an increase in volume.

Boils down to Demand supply issue, and Demand should match supply no matter what efficiencies we can think of incrementally to solve, will only be incremental in nature.

 

Pooling, off hour usage, public transport, cycling, compact cars can increase the capacity of the system, which is practicing as eco-friendly choices by all.

so the concepts of lean Six Sigma very well stand the truth of traffic mgmt chaos as well.

 

Thank you for initiating our thoughts on this topic, once again...

Hi Mr. Khatri,

In some Oriental countries, traffic management is based on Fuzzy Logic. Here at the traffic signals, the lights are turned on/off automatically by the load of the traffic approaching the intersection. Traffic police play more of a backup role. Not sure if this model could be implemented in India!