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Traffic Trouble-shooter By BEN
GLASSON |
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Motor News Oct/Nov 2000 |
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It’s
ten past eight and time to check the traffic situation this grey morning with
Frank Weston from the Roads and Public Transport Division. Good morning,
Frank. How’s the traffic flowing this
morning?” Well, there
are a few delays motorists can expect heading into the city this
morning. The top of Macquarie St is a
quite heavy as usual, and if you are heading down along the Brooker, be
prepared for a bit of a delay. The Tasman Bridge is giving a nice smooth run,
as are most of the roads in and around the city. The roads are still just a
little wet and slippery so remember to take care out there and make sure you
get to work safely. OK,
many thanks Frank and we’ll talk to you again tomorrow. Frank Weston has been helping motorists get to and from
work safely for over 30 years. While Frank is best known for his morning and evening
radio broadcasts on stations such as 7ZR and HO-FM, he’s also responsible for
running the central computer system, known as SCATS 5, that coordinates
traffic lights at nearly every intersection in Hobart, as well as Launceston
and the North West. Frank is a Senior Engineering Assistant in the Traffic
Management Branch, part of the Roads & Public Transport Division. His working day begins in the traffic control room near
the old 1 Collins St. Transport Building.
With a bank of monitors linked to 18 traffic cameras around the city
and a computer terminal logged in to SCATS, he has at his fingertips a better
picture of the traffic situation than anybody else. Frank can pan, tilt and zoom each camera to focus on the 60-odd
intersections that are under his supervision. When the morning rush hour has subsided and the last
radio station broadcast is done, Frank moves across town to his office at 10
Murray St. Here, programming the
SCATS system and investigating motorist complaints keeps him busy until just
before 4:30pm. That’s when he heads
back down to the traffic control room for the evening peak hour and more
radio station call-ins. SCATS—which stands for Sydney Co-ordinated Adaptive
Traffic System (it was first developed in Sydney but is now used around the
world in places like Shanghai, Dublin and the US)—helps minimizes travel times
for motorists is by coordinating green lights along major routes to ensure a
smooth run. “With SCATS, we can take an area as a whole and try to
get the minimum travel times through the system,” says Frank. “If you’re travelling 40kmh up Davey St,
which is a perfect one-way coordinated street in Hobart, you can get green
lights all the way through. So,
that’s what SCATS does—it links all these traffic lights together.” Frank doesn’t have much time for people who try to race
a coordinated set of traffic lights—because there’s just no point. Yet he sees it all the time. “They’re travelling up Davey St, they get a yellow light
and they plant their foot on it. You
pull up normally, but when you take off on the next lot of green lights,
there you are beside the bloke that just rushed through. But what did he gain? One, or two sets of
lights before he was pulled up at the red signal! And there you are, you’ve caught up with him, and look at the
petrol you’ve saved just by taking things easy.” “So when you’re running with a coordinated system
there’s no hurry. The lights are set
to 40kmh during normal business periods and 45kmh after hours.” Thanks to SCATS, if a fault arises in the traffic signal
controller, such as a burnt-out lamp or a stuck pushbutton, the main system
is notified immediately. “If they
find something wrong with their program or something wrong with the signal
display, then within a tenth of a second they will shut themselves down to
flashing yellow and register a fault.” SCATS also counts how many vehicles pass through each
intersection, and how long it took them.
This sort of information helps traffic engineers plan new roads and
intersections. And while SCATS does a terrific job by itself, there is
no substitute for a little human input, says Frank. “We actually trim the
system to make it work a little bit faster than it will by itself,” he
explains. “Even though SCATS takes
its own information and does a pretty good job, in most cases we can help it
on its way if something unusual happens.” By pushing a few buttons, Frank helps speed emergency
vehicles through traffic, or closes off streets for special events such as
the Queen’s recent visit to Hobart. As you can imagine, Frank and his colleagues see many
things go on on the roads. While they
are constantly trying to ensure a smooth flow of traffic, they continually
see motorists place their self-interest above the majority. “The thing that annoys us most is the number of drivers
that enter an intersection when they cannot clear that intersection,” affirms
Frank. “The traffic is blocked across
the road, but they continue driving, block the intersection, the lights
change, and no cars can travel in the other direction!” “Now that still happens continuously,” he says,
bemused. “It’s really totally
inconsiderate. It’s very, very
annoying to us trying to control traffic.” Seeing the big picture through the traffic cameras and
SCATS highlights the pointlessness in these drivers’ plans, says Frank. “We know that those motorists who have
blocked the intersection more than likely won’t get through the next green
light at the next intersection anyway, so they’ve saved themselves virtually
no time.” “With some of these cameras we’d like to have a big P.A. system with a microphone on this end so we can yell out to the motorists, ‘That’s not a very nice thing you’ve done! For your own sake, you’ve held up fifty to a hundred and fifty motorists in another direction!’” says Frank, half-jokingly. “We
favour the flow of traffic, and we favour the majority flow of course—we’ve
got to.” |
phone +61 362 311 611
e-mail ben@benglasson.com