INDIANAPOLIS – The city of Indianapolis is working on a way to make your commute faster, and it doesn't involve more road construction.
There’s nothing more frustrating than being stuck at an intersection and having the light turn green – only to get a red light at the next corner.
Traffic management officials say they’re in the process of upgrading the downtown signals to a system connected with fiber optics. That new system will allow the city to monitor the lights in ‘real-time’ and make changes to them.
Those changes should help with traffic flow in some of the high congestion times like after football games or during afternoon rush hour, because they can make the lights hold green longer while people are traveling out of the city.
In Indianapolis, if you travel the speed limit you’re supposed to hit all green lights, to keep traffic moving smoothly. But that’s not the way it always works out.
According to traffic management, the lights can get out of sync for many reasons, but with more than 1,100 traffic lights across Indianapolis, it’s a lot to keep track of.
Each light is run by its own computer. Those computers are located in the gray boxes at the side of the intersection and they tell the lights what to do. But like any computer they’re susceptible to problems.
“There’s a power glitch, power failure, or someone hits something,” said Lenny Adair with the Department of Public Works.
And they say even when there are problems, they don’t always know about them, because they don’t get reported.
If you notice a problem with lights not changing correctly, traffic management says you should call the mayor's action center and make a report. So they can send someone out to fix it.
