How to reduce highway travel time, lower gas consumption, and prevent accidents, at a minimal cost – and why the government won’t do it.

We pride ourselves on being the “startup nation”, positioned at the cutting edge of science and technology. But in one area, we’re still locked in the mindset of the 1960s, when private vehicle travel not only wasn’t the norm, but was actively frowned upon by successive socialist-led governments as decadent. You see the results every day, with blocked highways, jammed-tight urban roads, cars parked on pavements, and a high accident rate.

For the moment, I’m leaving aside urban traffic control, because that’s a special case with multiple variables like alternative transport routes (buses, trains, etc) and concentrating on inter-urban traffic along major highways. 

A short history of controlled traffic flow

In the 1950s and ‘60s, European countries like Germany, the Netherlands and France became enthusiastic adopters of “the Green Wave” method of flow control. Engineers realised that if signals along an arterial were given carefully calculated offsets, a platoon of vehicles could travel through many intersections without stopping. Without major costs, simply timing the phases of traffic lights at intersections produced major improvements in traffic time, reduced accidents, and even became a valid tool for speed control.

In the same time window, American cities adopted green waves extensively. However, they encountered a problem because most US cities are built on grids, so optimising one avenue often disrupted the cross streets. Eventually engineers moved away from simple progression toward network optimization, which made the mathematics much more complicated.

London was a special case, because its streets evolved over centuries rather than being laid out........

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