Automologist MAC tells us about a new system that may put an end to traffic light congestion.
Tun Razak/Jalan Ampang just about every night as impatient drivers block the junction to make their turn.
How many times have you sat at a traffic light waiting…waiting…waiting…The intersection is clear in all directions yet the lights are still red and you have to kick your heels. Malaysia is currently the world’s third-highest in car ownership, with 93% of all households owning at least one car. The average urban Malaysian waits for at least 40 minutes per day, needlessly, according to a well-known GPS navigation firm that collects these stats. What this means is every year, the average Malaysian spends the equivalent of 158 hours or 230 work days staring blankly at their windscreen as our blood pressure slowly rises.
A common sight at Malaysian junctions.
In Malaysia, we are accustomed to seeing Traffic Cops overriding the lights during rush hour to try to keep the traffic flowing. This is because most traffic lights work on simple timers that do not gauge the traffic flow and thus can create more traffic woes than they solve. Just try to get across the Tun Razak/Jalan Ampang junction as I do four times a day—very stressful!
So, why doesn’t anyone come up with a smarter way to programme the lights? Well, they have. TM ONE, a subsidiary of Telekom Malaysia, has been trialling a system that responds to real-time data collected by a network of cameras and sensors. It is called Traffic Analytics and Recognition System (STARS) and it puts together some cloud and brand new software and analytics to adjust traffic lights and thus optimise traffic flow. Engineers also monitor the system and alter the sequence of the lights (hang on, that sounds similar to the traffic cop intervention).
It is Smart.
The STARS system has been on trial since 2016 in Cyberjaya along the Persiaran Multimedia and it is claimed to have reduced congestion by 65%, which sounds pretty impressive to me. The system can also detect Emergency Service vehicles and adjusts the operation of the lights to allow these vehicles to get through a junction faster. It all sounds good but when are the rest of us going to be able to get through junctions quicker?
Unfortunately for TM ONE, the system they plan to deploy on some unspecified date in the future in 1,800 locations may already be out of date. That is because of a new system from Aston University in the British Midlands where they wanted to reduce the 115 hours per year that British drivers wait for the lights to change, despite having a system in place very similar to the STARS.
Aston University claims that they are the first in the world to deploy advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) using reinforced learning, where the program can realise it is not doing a good job and try a different approach; it is linked to live cameras and sensors to keep the traffic flowing and reduce congestion, and all without any hooman intervention. As the system can look down the road and see what traffic is coming and can decide the course of action before the traffic hits the junction, it has the edge over most other systems out there, according to Dr George Vogiatzis who oversaw the development of the system by a team of researchers.
I don’t care what system we get in Malaysia, surely we can do better though than tasking Traffic Cops to become Traffic Wardens…
