Saving Gas -- Saving $$

Reported August 2008

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- No one likes being stuck at a red light. Poor traffic light timing not only hurts your commute, it can hurt your wallet. Now, there is a way that small change in traffic lights can save you big in gas money.

With record high gas prices, consumers find ways to save fuel and save money. But gas pumps aren’t the only thing sucking up your money. Out-of-sync traffic lights are costing drivers an extra five trips to the pump every year.

Now, transportation engineers are working to time traffic lights better to improve traffic flow. It could help cut fuel consumption up to 10%, and save 17-billion gallons of gas a year!

“Basically try to find a timing plan that could satisfy drivers needs, try to go through the lights without being stopped every time,” Byungkyu Park, Ph.D., a transportation engineer at the University of Virginia, told Ivanhoe.

The engineers, applying operations research, developed a computer simulation program to re-create a virtual road in Charlottesville, Va. The program watches traffic flow and searches for the best traffic light timing pattern that has the least amount of stops and delays for drivers.

“If we believe in computer simulation models, sometime that travel times could be reduced by 20 to 30 percent,” Dr. Park said.

For a thousand dollars per intersection, the U.S. could have well-timed lights, less congestion and more fuel savings. Something consumers are watching closely. It would cost the U.S. $250 million a year to change traffic lights. Instead, billions of dollars are spent on building or widening roads -- a far more costly approach to yield similar results. Giving the green light to save money.

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Byungkyu (Brian) Park, Assistant Professor
Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4742
(434) 924-6347
bp6v@Virginia.EDU

Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(310) 394-1811
http://www.hfes.org

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
Barry List
(443) 757-3560
barry.list@informs.org

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