Let’s face it: is there anyone these days who doesn’t hate traffic? The ever-increasing number of cars using an almost immutable roads infrastructure lead us to this constant frustration. It is nowadays the same like in was back in 2009 when we started to look closely to this problem. We have analyzed the busiest roads in our hometown city Iasi. We run countless car statistics considering different time periods during the day. Even built a computerized simulator to help us in deciding which algorithm and road setup fit the best the actual traffic parameters collected during our audits. Next, it was more than two years of analysis and simulations in other big cities in Romania. Even the busiest European road in Romania E85 caught our attention as is traversed from North to South several important cities like Bacău, Roman or Focșani leading to severe traffic congestions along its way. Finally, our response to this problem was Green Wave.
This innovative traffic management system comes with a number of logistical advantages and especially with a low-cost implementation foremost benefit being felt directly by participants in traffic: way much less time spent in traffic. How can this goal be achieved? By implementing the green wave system in both traveling directions on a road, the solution is capable of eliminating unnecessary stops at traffic lights. Green Wave promise: Vehicles that enter on a road integrated into green wave will stop at most one traffic light: the one located at the end of the road sector optimized when preparing to enter the green light or the first traffic light on artery with green wave in case they enter from a road adjacent to that implementing green wave.
Why Green Wave?
- Because time and life, in general, are very precious and wasting them waiting for a traffic light to be green, traffic light after traffic light, day by day, is completely wrong.
- Because authorities’ lack of ideas and/or solutions in eliminating traffic congestions is not an excuse for spending hours on a daily basis stuck in traffic. Multiply that by the number of traffic participants and suddenly you’ll obtain centuries of work capacity in your quest of “waiting for the green light to pop-up”.
- Coming as a complementary solution to the already existing road infrastructure the implementation costs are reduced drastically. Competing solutions are sometimes implemented for millions of euros and have outcomes that we all are negatively experiencing.
- The system comes as a fully integrated solution and its installation can be achieved also by the road administrator where implementation of green wave is desired.
Highlights
- The traffic management paradigm is completely changed. Instead of looking at how many cars are using the road, Green Wave looks at the total road transportation capacity and creates the green wave there. The road is the only real bottleneck in traffic management and this is a constant that can not be easily affected.
- As a direct consequence of the changed traffic paradigm no traffic detectors are needed (e.g. inductive sensors in asphalt, meter cameras, radars)
- The road is used at its maximum capacity, by granting instantaneously and continuously the maximum road transportation capacity. Thus the car flow is optimized to 100%.
- The system is fully modular and can be offered in several custom build variants: with traffic surveillance cameras, w/o traffic surveillance cameras, w/ or w/o SCADA command center and so on.
- The traffic audit takes only several days and after that, the Green Wave setup can be achieved in a matter of days up to several months depending on the existing road infrastructure and on the data communication protocol chosen to implement the green wave.
- The system was designed taking into consideration a series of constraints: obtain the minimal number of stops at traffic lights (GW Solution: 1 stop at most) affect as less as possible the present road infrastructure (GW Solution: no cars detectors, no damaged road surface for detectors installation, no cars radars), minimal cost for the best performance for the GW necessary equipment, possibility to remotely monitor and control the green wave (GW Solution: SCADA center implementation).
