Service Request #2: Why Is This Red Light So Damn Long?

Vivian leg works with me at 99% invisible, and she's on her way out for after work drinks

at one of her favorite bars in LA, and my husband Cody is driving us.

“I'd like to say because I'm recording, but you're driving me because what?”

Because you're a passenger princess. That's exactly correct. Some people enjoy driving. Some people like Vivian really do not, but nobody enjoys being stuck in traffic. No one's moving.

What are you doing? I'm going to burn the intersection of the ground and piss on the ashes. Oh my god. LA is famously a cartown, known for its endless freeways, and its sole crushing rush hour traffic. An inner city full of bad intersections.

Vivian and Cody are headed towards one that many considered to be the worst. It's where three roads, Fairfax, Olympic, and San Vicente all intersect.

“I think it's technically called the Fairfax Asterisk, but I like to think of it as the Devil's Three Way,”

because we have this weird triangle in the middle, and there are like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 traffic lights. To navigate this intersection, Vivian and Cody have to make it through two traffic lights, and quick succession, only a couple hundred feet apart. Oh god. It caught right in the middle. Oh no.

We are stuck in the middle. They make it through one traffic light, but then get stopped at the next one. And now they're stuck right in the middle of the triangle. Oh god. So there are... oh god. We're old, boy. We are in B2. Oh my god.

I'm Delaney Hall, and this is Service Request, from 99% invisible and campsite media. We rarely think about infrastructure until it breaks, and then suddenly it is all we can think about. So every week, we're diving into your burning questions about the invisible systems all around us. We're exploring how infrastructure works, and how it's designed and maintained. Today, traffic lights in LA.

We're looking at the system behind them, meeting the people who decide when they flip from one color to another, and trying to answer the question on every LA driver's mind. Why is this red light so damn long? Oh you son of a bitch. The roots of LA's modern traffic system go back to 1984 when the city was preparing to host the Olympic Games.

LA was expecting more than a million visitors and thousands of athletes.

Traffic in LA was bad, and all these people would be flooding into a city that was already pretty maxed out. City leaders were worried that athletes and spectators wouldn't be able to make it to their events. You're going to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and some of your friends are asking your questions.

“Aren't those freeways congested? Can you find your way around? What about the smog?”

At this time, all of the traffic lights in LA operated independently from each other. Each one had a timing mechanism that would flip the light from green to yellow to red on a regular cadence. If a traffic light broke, or if an intersection got extra congested, engineers would likely find out about it from angry phone calls. And then, someone from the city would have to drive out to that intersection to manually reprogram the timing mechanism of the traffic light.

In the process, they would often get stuck in the same congestion they were trying to fix. But the Olympics gave city engineers the motivation and the funding to try something new. With the games looming, a transportation official named Ed Rowe, assembled a small team, and they started tinkering. And what they came up with was a network that connected 118 traffic lights around the LA Coliseum into a single system.

For the first time, instead of sending someone out to every congested intersection,

engineers could see what was happening across a whole area, and then adjust signal timing remotely in real time. The system went online just before the game started.

This is Selena Reynolds. She's the chief innovation officer at LA Metro, and for eight years she ran LA's traffic light system.

“Trying to make traffic a little bit better in one of the most traffic ye cities in the world.”

There are a lot of other really interesting things that happened during the 84 games to make it such a success. But if you ask anybody who was here at the time, they will say, "Wow, they really solved traffic."

The first full day of Olympic competition saw few hurdles on the massive LA freeway system.

The game is not only avoided gridlock, but the sea breeze is also cooperated. And sort of famously, when the games were over, the mayor at the time Tom Bradley at the closing press conference said, "The games are over, let the traffic begin." So there was this sort of feeling that everybody had made it work for the period of the games, and now we were going to be back to our old ways. It reminds me a little of the extraordinary measures you hear every city taking like basing, firing particulate into the air to make the smog like rain away before the crowds came for the Olympic.

So it's interesting to me that in many ways it was one of these extraordinary measures that was taken to try to solve a problem temporarily for the Olympics. But then it continued. Why did it continue?

“I think the engineers at the time were very excited by the improvements that they had seen, and they were real and measurable.”

They had reduced people's delay by about 30-35 percent, which in turn improved emissions, right, because you didn't have as many people idling, because you were just moving the most efficiently possible. LA's success with traffic during the Olympics made a big impact. Cities planning future Olympics called them for advice, and in the years that followed officials from Salt Lake City and Sydney and Beijing, all wanted to study what LA's transit leaders had built. As the system continued to expand, it got even more sophisticated, with new high-tech tools that could sense the conditions on the roads and then respond automatically.

Los Angeles is now trying to un-style its traffic by applying some very advanced technology. The city has begun to plan electronic sensors beneath major downtown intersections. Those sensors determine the speed and density of traffic and feed that information to a computer beneath city hall.

“The computer analyzes the information and automatically operates traffic lights to relieve congestion and speed up traffic flow.”

We reduced the delay at intersections by about 20 percent. We reduced stops by 35 percent.

By the way, that last voice was Ed Rowie, who died in 2023. When we come back, we'll learn about how LA's traffic system has grown since the Olympics, and why it is now known as the eighth wonder of the transportation world. That's after the break. Since 1984, the small scrappy system that started with the Olympics has grown into one of the most sophisticated traffic management operations in the world. Today, it's known as ATSAC, advanced transportation, system, and coordination, and it controls almost all of the city's 5,000 traffic signals.

And while it would be malpractice to say that the system has solved LA's traffic issues, it has made traffic a little less bad. Believe it or not, without this system, the streets of LA would be even more clogged. The way it works is that there are sensors buried in the pavement at most intersections across the city, and they count cars as they pass. The sensors feed a constant stream of data back to a control room in downtown LA, where engineers can watch a live map of LA traffic. One of street starts to back up, the system automatically responds.

It can extend a green light or make one shorter, nudging timing across the whole system of intersections, to help traffic flow more smoothly. And there are traffic engineers, transportation engineers, and planners, and other folks that are sitting in an office in downtown Los Angeles.

They have hundreds of cameras that give them basically a 360 degree view of the city at any time.

And they also have a landscape view of what's happening with every single transportation signal at all of the 5,000 plus intersections that they're monitoring at any given time. So these various signals run into At-Sack, which I am imagining as sort of the NASA Mission Control Center, is that what it looks like.

Houston, we have our truck in his number one, two, eight.

“Selena told me the At-Sack Control Room has become legendary among traffic nerds, and it's been featured in a couple of movies, including a 2003 heist film called The Italian Job.”

We're moving out. There's this scene where someone hacks into the At-Sack system to create a huge traffic jam in the middle of LA. Good luck time.

We've crashed. It's not a crash. We've got power. I can't log in.

“And there's a shot of the At-Sack Control Room in the movie with engineers holding their heads in their hands staring at these enormous screens that show intersections across the city.”

They're totally freaking out as cars smash into each other, and traffic descends into chaos. So in that control room, you're saying it's a mix of technology and human intervention to make the signals change. So in some cases, there's a person pressing buttons flipping switches and making the lights change. They can do that in extraordinary circumstances.

“So when I first got to Los Angeles, there was actually a giant sinkhole that opened up in the ground over by UCLA, less dramatic than that.”

There's spontaneous protests or other things happening. At that point, they're making decisions about okay, we're going to leave this light on green for longer and clear people out of a space when they need to be redirected or rerouted. But these are mostly extraordinary circumstances. For the most part, it sounds like there are computers that are making decisions about when to flip from green to yellow. Yeah, think about the way that we're managing movement through a city, you know, we're managing it in space and time.

And the space is limited, right? We have 7500 miles of streets in the city of Los Angeles, so there's a lot, but we have what we have it's fixed. So that congestion that you experience, that's too much demand for a fixed amount of space. I like this idea that traffic engineering is all about space and time because it elevates what seems like a mundane discipline into something a little more epic. The space part is pretty simple. Basically, every car, bus, bicycle and pedestrian is competing for the same fixed space on the roads.

And the reality is that engineers cannot do much to expand that space, but they can work with time. And that's where their special algorithms come in.

There is so much data collected from those sensors embedded in the pavement, and it reveals stuff like rush hour patterns and holiday surges and what a Wednesday on the road looks like versus a Sunday. And the algorithms crunch through all that information and then translate it into precisely timed traffic lights. For the most part, those algorithmic sort of calculations for how much green time one street gets versus the other. And that balancing, it's pretty fixed by the time of day and the day of the week and so on and so forth. But there are moments when unpredictable things happen and the sensors have a certain amount of intelligence and they're able to to perceive those changes and reallocate things in real time and then sometimes the system becomes so strained that it breaks and you have to have a human in the loop to intervene and actually manage it manually.

And that human needs to be connected to all of the other humans that are there to make things work. But to move this many cars and this large of a system that has this much complexity and variation. You have to have all of those things at the same time. And it sounds like this increasingly sort of brain-breaking math problem, like how you synchronize across that many signals and how you make this intersection flow smoothly without creating chaos in an intersection somewhere else that sounds so hard.

It is and it's also, we're talking about people's lives, right? That's one of the reasons why people love transportation is because it has such an immediate effect on people's lives. And so part of what you're also doing is trying to figure out the tolerance that exists across the system for delay or frustration. And so you're having to sort of consider how pain is being spread around.

So on the main drag, there may be, let's say, 45 or 50,000 people a day that are driving on that main street. On the cross streets, you have a much smaller number of people. And so you're going to privilege the greatest good for the greatest number, right?

“And a privilege the 50,000 people on the main line and the people on the side streets are going to experience more pain because they're going to have to wait a little bit longer, but eventually you're going to get to go.”

Right. What I hear you saying is that it's collective and there's also something a bit utilitarian about it. And that goes for everybody who's using the street, right? People biking and walking as well. If there's a bus, right? That's coming along or a train that needs to make it across the street. There's a lot more people moving much more efficiently in the train or on the bus or even on a bike taking up a lot less space, which again is one of our most precious resources. And so figuring out how to how to balance safety, efficiency, delay and the sort of quality of people's lives are all the ingredients that have to go into the creativity with which the system gets managed.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about this as it's this highly engineered system, there's algorithms, there's lights, there's wires, but ultimately it is about people's time. It's actually very human.

I consider it as much of an art as it is a science. You know, when we move a little white line on the street, you know, six inches this way or six inches that way, we know that it changes how fast people drive or how they behave. And so it's a lot more about human behavior than it is about a math equation. Yeah, exactly.

“When we come back, 99 PI producer Vivienne Leigh visits the Atset Control Room. Once she's there, she hacks into the system and screws up traffic across LA in order to facilitate the movement of a huge amount of stolen gold, just kidding.”

She just wants to figure out what's up with her least favorite intersection, the Fairfax Asterisk. That's when we return.

Hi, good morning. The Atset Control Room is located in downtown LA in a huge glass building around the corner from City Hall.

It's a big space that looks kind of like a corporate meeting room with blue gray carpet and a wall of glass windows where you can see traffic down below. But the main attraction is the huge block of screens that stretches across the front of the room. It displays live camera feeds of intersections across the city so that engineers can keep an eye on where congestion is building up and why it's building up. The camera showed me why it's congested. This is Eric Zambon, a transportation engineer in charge of the Atset Center.

He gave Vivienne a tour last month and talked her through the big screen and what it allows the engineers to see.

Is there a emergency vehicle that's blocking a lane causing congestion or is there even a crash in the middle of the intersection? In at that point we jump on our system and we would modify signal timing parameters to best help people get around those locations. On that same big screen, there's also a map of every traffic signal in LA. They show up as multicolored dots of light. So that's the graphic of all the traffic signals every dot is a note or a traffic signal and that's our signal network. This shows in real time the status of the signals in the city. Every color represents something to us.

And although it just looks like a Christmas tree to some people, it tells us the operation of the signals just at quick glance.

“We're looking at, you know, the layout of Los Angeles mostly green. Could you explain to me like what patterns you see when you look at this, what does this actually mean to you?”

Okay, so green means it's online good communication. It's running a cycle length. Right now we're coming up on just past the AM peak traffic period. All right, so things are starting to slow down. As Eric explained, most of the traffic lights were working well and they were running their usual timing. As the cars start to congest, it ramps up the green time to help provide throughput to get people through that area.

Could I ask you about one intersection in particular that really grinds my gears?

“Of course, are you from other? I am from LA. It's pretty close to me. Do you know what the Fairfax Astroscus?”

Yeah, so that was designed well before we had our current eyeballs. Yes, it's so bad and there's nothing I can do about that. We've viewed that through the lens of 50, 60 years of traffic. We have put that into traffic signal modeling software. We've done everything we can and I hate to say this, but the confluence of three major streets during peak hours leads to nothing but frustration and signal timing can't fix it.

And we had just inherited that very bizarre geometrically bizarre intersection that has terrific signals. And we have to assign right away two different streets going east west and one going north south. And it's proven to be a very difficult thing. I don't know that it'll get better.

“Do you feel like you have to kind of just do what you can with like the mess that you've been giving?”

That's exactly how I feel. I'm only laughing because you described what goes on in my mind every day. It's that space time problem again, as Salita Reynolds described it. The Atsex system has improved traffic in LA, but it can't control the fundamental layout of the streets or the number of people using them. It can't control the fact that LA was built as one of the most car centric cities in the world. Engineers can play with time, coaxing millions of people through various bottlenecks, but sometimes no matter how advanced their algorithms, it's still kind of lipstick on a pig.

And they're still left with something like the Fairfax Asterisk, an intersection that just was not designed to handle so many cars. So, I just want to understand sort of how much what we've learned about Atsex might apply to another city.

So if someone's sitting at a red light in another city, you know, Des Moines, Miami, how much of what's happening is basically the same and how much is really unique to the Atsex system itself.

A lot of other cities will have maybe part of the city on a connected traffic management system, and most other major metropolitan areas will have a centralized traffic management center, where they'll be the same kind of setup. They'll be some cameras, they'll be some video, but it's usually for some subset of their city, some smaller, you know, maybe it's the downtown and it's a sort of a smaller scale kind of place where things are being managed. And so it is a repeatable sort of blueprint that has become kind of state of the practice.

Okay, and then finally, another Olympics are coming, it's 44 years after Atsex was born.

“Is it going to play a similar role? This time around, is it going to expand again?”

Yes, absolutely, it's going to play a similar role, and we have some more tricks up our sleeve in terms of what does Atsex 3.0 look like for the 28 games and how can we make sure that we're moving the trains and the buses and keeping people on foot safe and getting around by biker scooter, one of the most fun and attractive ways to do so. Well, thank you so much, Salida, it was really fun to learn about this system. We really appreciate having you on. Yeah, my pleasure. We're about to go through the intersection.

Back at that terrible intersection, Vivian and Cody are waiting. We're just sitting on a red light so this might be a lot of dead air for a while. Someone's crossing the intersection on the roller blades and crazy in the dark, too. And the dark, but pretty soon, the light changes and they start to move. Okay, we are turning left on Fairfax, here we go.

Oh, green lights, all the way. All right, that's it. That's a bad, right? I wasn't so bad. Not the worst traffic we've ever been in. We started with the question, how do LA's traffic lights actually work?

And the answer is that the whole city is wired up.

and they connect through miles of underground fiber optic cables to a centralized control room.

“In that control room, engineers monitor traffic flow and make adjustments in real time.”

It's a system that started very small when Ed Rowie and his team faced this impossible task, which was to keep traffic moving smoothly during the 1984 Olympic Games. And since then, the system has grown, and Atsack now manages nearly 5,000 traffic lights

at intersections across the city.

With that, consider this service request resolved.

“Today on the show, you heard Salita Reynolds, the Chief Innovation Officer at LA Metro,”

and Eric Zambon, a Transportation Engineer in charge of the Atsack Traffic Management Center for LA DOT. You also heard video and lay, supervising producer at 99PI, and her husband, Cody Franklin.

We're going to go to our pub now.

Bye. What infrastructure mystery keeps you up at night? Is there something in your life that you use every day, but you don't actually understand how it works? Some major service requests by recording a voice memo with your question,

and emailing it to [email protected].

“And remember, the next time you're stuck in traffic and you are cursing the lights,”

know that somewhere there's an engineer who has spent years trying to steal back seconds on your behalf. One green light at a time. I'm Delaney Hall. Infrastructure is everywhere, and we are here to help you decode it. Service request is a production of 99% invisible and campsite media.

The show is produced in fact checked by Julia Case Levine, and edited by Shoshi Smulivitz. Mixed by E-Wim Ly Trimulin. Theme song in music by Swanray All, Show Arts by Erin Nester. Roman Mars is our boss at 99PI. Kathy II is 99PI's Executive Producer.

Matt Share is the Executive Producer at Campside. We are part of the Sirius XM Podcast Family. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.