Ever been stuck in the wrong light cycle? You get stuck at one red light, after another, and another, and so on? It’s great when you’re can zip through a long sequence of greens, but most annoying to hop from red to red. Researchers at UVA have used new logarthims and computer technology to solve many of the pesky light timing problems that are more than irritating -- they actually add up to problems for the environment.

By retooling computer programs, lead scientist Byungkyu Park, has been able to take into account erratic, disorderly, illegal driving much like the on-the-ground experience of most drivers. Right now, the computers that time lights think everyone moves in synchronized, orderly lines and acts rationally. Park’s program takes into account variables like tailgaters, people who drive in the shoulder, car crashes, construction, detours, speeding and more. By creating a more realistic program, he is able to reduce cars’ time idling at lights. That means savings of both time and gas. In fact, Park estimates he can save the U.S. more than one billion gallons of gas per year.

“To solve this problem, we realized we should look into the individual vehicle level [and] understand individual human driving behavior,” Park says. “We are using a high-fidelity computer model to deal with individual driving behavior to create a microscopic traffic simulation program that models basically every single vehicle in the system.” By simulating driving on the small scale, he is more able to represent real life driving conditions.

Now that we have the lights down, how do we get cities to adopt technology like this? That seems to be a tall order. While the price of systems (computers, sensors and other technology) that monitor traffic flow have fallen sharply, elected officials are resistant to adopt them because voters don’t get it. Other, easier to understand techniques, like widening roads, are less effective -- or even counter-effective -- to the goal of reducing gridlock, yet have more political traction. Politicians need to work harder to inform voters about new options so that they can garner the political support required to launch them.