Prioritizing buses and bicycles on the streets of Copenhagen
Copenhagen aims be to carbon neutral by 2025 and is pushing itself ahead to achieve it. The city plans on achieving its goal by adding more wind and solar electricity to the grid, updating the energy guzzling buildings, replacing coal with biomass and encouraging even more residents to use bikes and public transportation.
To prioritize buses and bikes and to lure the residents to use these modes of transportation, the city is installing an Intelligent Transport Systems Action Plan to make bicycle and bus commuting faster, and hence desirable. Installing intelligent traffic signals will help achieve this goal where the smart traffic lights will cut bus travel time by up to 20 percent and bicycle commute time by 10 percent. Installing these 380 lights will cost the city $8.9 million.
Buses:
The city buses will communicate the details of the trip such as the number of passengers, the geographic position and scheduling delays (if any) to the system. In return, in order to keep the buses moving, the traffic lights will stay green for 8 to 30 seconds more, giving special priority to the buses running behind schedule or overcrowded. As a pilot project, the city installed 10 smart signals in the Valby district and found that the buses saved up to two minutes during rush hour (in an area covering less than 2 square miles). These traffic signals will also clear congested areas after events.
Bicycles:
Copenhagen has also created a handful of ‘green waves’, stretches of road where the traffic lights are timed in a way that the cyclists or anyone travelling around 12 mph never hits a red light. In order to maintain the speed of the bicyclists during bad weather, the green waves will also light up the way until the weather clears. Three or four similar stretches will be added and modified accordingly.
The city hasn’t released an official statement of when the city will have the system installed but it certainly is moving in the correct direction. It will be interesting to see the actual results once the system is in place.
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