LA In Sync: Traffic Signals To Cut Travel Times

I wonder if any of the planners have been thinking the same way about this project.

EDIT: let me guess.

Burn 1 US gallon of petrol = 17.68 US pounds of CO2 (see http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=307&t=11) = 8.02 kg. 1,000,000 tonnes is 1,000,000,000 kg, so 124,688,279 US gallons of petrol (so 471,996,258 litres, or 3m barrels, or something like 0.04% of all US annual consumption).

The California petrol tax per US gallon is $0.36 (http://www.boe.ca.gov/sptaxprog/spftdrates.htm), so this amounts to $44m. (Don't forget my calculations are quick and dirty.) So that's hardly nothing, but compared to the rest of the budget, a mere drop in the ocean, and probably worth doing if it speeds traffic flow and if reduced spew of noxious poisons and greenhouse gases is a policy goal.

(The same calculation run across the whole of the UK would probably produce more compelling numbers, suggesting that the green wave is a poor idea for the government - but reduction in greenhouse gases is a current policy.)

In the south, southwest and the pacific northwest the incidence of loops is much higher than in the northeast. There's also more driving, so the incentive to optimize that part of the experience is much higher than say, in the Boston area, where they really just want you to give up the car and use public transportation.

To put things in perspective, the city of San Jose, CA is currently doing a similar upgrade to the city's traffic signals and controllers at a cost of ~25 million dollars. While it is expected to save money in the long run, that's a serious chunk of change. The project (as government contract jobs tend to do) has also gone several years past its due date.

Two things I've thought of that would work for both directions:

1) if it's a square grid, you could pick some streets that are optimized westbound, and some eastbound, for example. And then carefully arrange those so the north-south streets also mesh with it.

2) if you can space the lights the right distance apart, you could create a "standing wave" where it is actually optimized both ways. But you'd have to space them farther apart and more regularly than in real cities. For example, you could set lights apart by 1 minute travel time at 30mph, if the signal cycle is 1 minute.

I'm curious what other solutions are to this, and how they do it in a place like LA in practice!