250 intersections covered is nothing at all, I'm absolutely not surprised that private companies don't want to dedicate resources to interfacing with such a minuscule system.
200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
41–50 of 190 posts
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#42Just in case you wonder, these are apps of commercial data-sharing/selling businesses, not some 'official' gov app for the benefit of the citizens.
They are the products of https://ndrive.com/ , https://www.flitsmeister.nl and https://be-mobile.com/ .
They also focus on toll collecting and parking fees, so "pay to play" is in a sense already in their DNA. Why do these commercial entities get to influence public traffic lights? And due to the inherent red-queen arms race in this, not installing any of these apps will explicitly disadvantage you as the 'smart' traffic lights (already 1 in 8 and growing rapidly) do favor the app users.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#43This is solving the wrong problem. If a traffic light can turn green at a whim, for any arriving app user, the intersection is not busy enough to have a traffic light. Then the traffic light should be removed or switched off for those times, instead of getting a very expensive (I presume) upgrade. If the intersection is busy enough so that people are waiting on all (or most) stop lines, then simpler traffic density s…
> simpler traffic density sensors …which in practice tend to be more expensive to implement and maintain. Systems like this one can work because they take advantage of highly available commodity infrastructure.
In the most cases, you should imho skip the traffic lights all together and use a roundabout. Automatically balancing, can work to large capacities (not as large as traffic lights, but visit France if you need to see how much traffic they can handle). No fragile electronics, no power consumption, less maintenance, less accident-prone (really!).
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#44"We want to be present on the apps that people already use" How can they not see that an app for traffic lights is clearly the wrong approach? Smart traffic lights are working great in many countries without needing an app for them to work.
I think many in the comments are misunderstanding how this works, perhaps because it's not clearly explained, but my understanding is that they want to integrate with your navigation software so that they can predict (based on the routes of drivers navigating with a supported app) when certain vehicles will reach certain lights and adjust the timing so as not to cause traffic to have to slow down.
The only way to do this effectively is with a planned route, and hence why they need to use an app (the one you're using to navigate/route plan with) and why having the main navigation apps people tend to use (e.g. Waze, GMaps) is desirable.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#45I have no idea why the app is required here. Cars & bikes are massive, hot, & mobile objects. They're perfect for a modest-cost IR sensor atop the traffic light to detect them and adjust the lights accordingly. This type of system is commonplace in cities in the UK and works effectively. Having drivers reach for their phone when they're approaching traffic lights - common pedestrian crossing points - is categorically…
Cyclist aren't massive nor hot, on a hot summerday they will be cooler than the road surface. I think a camera with object recognition or something similar should be able to do it. It's not the first time apps are being shoved where they shouldn't belong by the Flemish Government. They made a cooking app of half a million Euro [1] and there were trials where you could use an app to to get the deposit back on plastic…
> Cyclist aren't massive nor hot, on a hot summerday they will be cooler than the road surface. I think a camera with object recognition or something similar should be able to do it.
I don't know the technical details on how it's done here in Stockholm, even less in the suburbs where I've lived but it feels like magic that in some traffic lights in busier intersections they'll just trigger by themselves with enough distance that when I arrive with the bike at the intersection the lights are turning green for me.
I have looked for cameras but couldn't find them, it's even more puzzling in a specific intersection close to my house where I bike along a 4-lane road with only fields of wheat and grass, and the intersection I cross leads to an industrial area, there are only the posts for the pedestrian/bike lights and those still turn green, no cameras in sight, no detection trap on the pavement.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#46I have no idea why the app is required here. Cars & bikes are massive, hot, & mobile objects. They're perfect for a modest-cost IR sensor atop the traffic light to detect them and adjust the lights accordingly. This type of system is commonplace in cities in the UK and works effectively. Having drivers reach for their phone when they're approaching traffic lights - common pedestrian crossing points - is categorically…
This isn't a system to detect if there are cars at an intersection. Wire loops and other systems already can and do measure cars like that. This is a system to detect "in 32 minutes, twenty-five cars will come from the south, crossing sixteen cars from the east. By pausing the western traffic lights for three seconds, both streams of cars can drive past each other without clogging up the main intersection". Users don…
Predict the exact traffic situation 32 minutes in the future? Where would the information come from? The actual system in Flanders predicts about 1 minute, and that only for the main arteries. And the system barely uses the info from the vehicles, the main source is induction loops. Only a small percentage of the vehicles send their location, and hardly any cyclist and pedestrians. Vehicles don't send their destination, only the 'turn-intention' on the next intersection. But even that is unreliable, so typically not used.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#47I wonder what technology they're using to back this. The Netherlands has a system not too dissimilar to this (seemingly mostly marketed towards bikes) with wide scale deployment in cities: https://map.udap.nl/app/viewer/subjects?subjectTypeId=TRAFFI... I don't think something like ETSI ITS can be implemented in apps like this, although ITS does seem to have a TCP/UDP transport so maybe I'm wrong. Packaging this in ap…
Thanks for sharing that link. The categories suggest that this system is mainly used to give priority to certain kinds of vehicles. Public transport and emergency vehicles already had a system to turn lights green, so this seems like an addition to extend the system to "milder" priority vehicles like construction without giving them access to the previous system. The location of the lights doesn't exactly point to us…
> The location of the lights doesn't exactly point to usage by cyclists.
It depends on the city, but unless you're on the highway or about to enter one, a traffic light here can be assumed to serve bikes.
I found that link a few years ago thanks to an app I used when I went to university: https://www.enschedefietsstad.nl/enschede-fietst-app/snel-gr... The municipality has an app that will integrate with the iVRI system to have traffic lights turn green faster for bikes. It doesn't do anything for cars, it's built purely to try to convince more people not to travel by car.
Of course, iVRI data providing information about incoming bicycles don't automatically reprogram traffic lights to give them priority. However, the information is available. I've had the Enschede app trigger a "this app requested X green lights during your ride" popup in other cities; I'm pretty sure it's just an iVRI integration, not one restricted by a specific municipality.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#48Flemish EMT here. There were a lot of privacy concerns for emergency services when this came out, and my service is in fact not using it on most ambulances. The same concerns were hand-waved away when it came to apps for regular drivers. It would not surprise me if that played a role for Google Maps/Waze not to support it. Or the market is too small here to be worth implementing.
In the US, there’s a thing called the Opticom. It’s just an extra light that is installed along with the normal light bar, and the traffic light recognizes the strobe pattern, and changes. https://www.fedsig.com/product/opticom/ No app required.
But highly susceptible to unauthorized use. The app version can also alert drivers directly with an audible alert that an emergency vehicle is close by
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#49Flemish EMT here. There were a lot of privacy concerns for emergency services when this came out, and my service is in fact not using it on most ambulances. The same concerns were hand-waved away when it came to apps for regular drivers. It would not surprise me if that played a role for Google Maps/Waze not to support it. Or the market is too small here to be worth implementing.
What are the privacy concerns relating to ambulances?
The concern was related to being able to know where emergency vehicles were. If you build a system that announces to traffic light “I’m police/fire/EMS, coming through”, you also build an early warning system for criminals and terrorists who either want to avoid or target you.
Re: 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
#50I have no idea why the app is required here. Cars & bikes are massive, hot, & mobile objects. They're perfect for a modest-cost IR sensor atop the traffic light to detect them and adjust the lights accordingly. This type of system is commonplace in cities in the UK and works effectively. Having drivers reach for their phone when they're approaching traffic lights - common pedestrian crossing points - is categorically…
This isn't a system to detect if there are cars at an intersection. Wire loops and other systems already can and do measure cars like that. This is a system to detect "in 32 minutes, twenty-five cars will come from the south, crossing sixteen cars from the east. By pausing the western traffic lights for three seconds, both streams of cars can drive past each other without clogging up the main intersection". Users don…
Is that level of complexity actually necessary? The way that the UK system appears to work (as a user) is that the IR sensor detects a vehicle approaching the intersection from the minor road and, if there are no vehicles approaching on the major road, it gives you a green light by the time you actually reach the junction.
I agree that the app-based system would theoretically be slightly better in that it has more information to work with, but given that we're basically talking about a stochastic process then it feels like the IR system should really be good enough.