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London Hacked Its Own Traffic Lights To Make Sure It Got the Olympics
bmsleight writes "Does it count as a hack if you change your own system? Vanity Fair report that during the bidding process for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the London Streets Traffic Control Center followed each vehicle using CCTV, 'and when they came up to traffic lights,' [bid committee CEO Keith] Mills said, 'we turned them green.'"
...except without all the crashes and explosions and mini-coopers with gold bricks in them.
Every Olympic bid since Sydney's bid for the 2000 games has done the same. This isn't anything new.
Last thing any sane person would want is being constantly followed. Now we know the Brits are willing to do this if they think they can get something out of it. So far for privacy. Oh and next time you're in the car with your pregnant wife trying to get to an hospital but can't because the lights are red... Well, the police chief is probably on his way home and needed the lights to be green...
using CCTV to change traffic lights (apart from showing just how widespread the coverage in London is) is almost minor compared to some of the other bid stunts - they took the motorcade through the (at that time, not yet opened) railway tunnels from St Pancras to Stratford, as if to demonstrate how easy it was to get to the Olympic site - provided you didn't see any of that "get in the way" stuff. Like the city...
"She's furniture with a pulse"
It's "Potemkin village".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
closing down the whole street for the convoy.
I consider this fair play.
fact, this is one of the capabilities that the Olympic Committee should specifically look for. The ability of a city to dynamically change its traffic lights and alter traffic flow to deal with a special situation is an important one in a city hosting an major event like this. It means that if they manage it properly, they can reduce congestion around the site, get atheletes and fans in and out quicker and have a better chance of having everything go on schedule. It's also a safety issue. If there are emergencies (and there always are when you have that many people in one place) you can get emergency vehicles in and out quickly.
London can probably do this better than most cities in the world because of its Big Brother system of pervasive security cameras. The cameras can be used for good, too, if they use them to reduce traffic congestion, detect that the crowd is starting to leave the event so they can begin adapting the traffic flow before people even leave the parking lot, etc.
1. Giving IOC Observers the lights didn't "Make Sure" that London got the Olympics. A major overstatement to be sure. /.ers. Not only do we do it with packets, we already to it on roads. Vehicles with sirens and lights have first priority, and at least in tUSA we give funeral parades second priority. Third priority goes to buses which have TSP [traffic signal prioritization] systems, thereby holding a light green or turning it green when a bus approaches. Last priority: us regular users. Giving a higher priority to IOC Observers might not be a great use of taxpayer dollars or appropriate for fairness, but that's a local political decision and certainly not a novel application of technology.
2. While London may have used CCTV, it surely wasn't necessary. A few motorcyclists or taxi drivers with mobile phones and headsets could have just as easily kept tabs on the IOC Observers [so could GPS, though perhaps not as accurately as humans].
3. The idea of prioritizing traffic in a network should not be novel to
But hey, the story involves CCTV, traffic lights, and sports which don't always involve a ball or a puck. Perfect fodder for a silly /. article.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
The little people get to wait for the important people -- like the Olympic committee, or in the future perhaps anyone with enough money -- when the city changes its traffic patterns for them. After all, it is not really equality if the important people have to wait for red lights just like everyone else, right?
As for emergency vehicles, I live in a small city right now that manages to give them green lights without a special CCTV system. Each traffic light has a sensor that detects sirens/flashers and changes the light appropriately; it may sound surprising, but this is actually a reliable, well-engineered system.
We have big events here too -- the college football team's games draw big crowds from neighboring towns. CCTV is not needed for that either; police can simply disable traffic lights at appropriate locations and direct traffic as needed. Perhaps this is more than London could be expected to do, given how large of a city they are, but somehow I doubt it -- they have a much larger police force than we have.
Really, the benefit of the CCTV system for traffic control is overstated here. What London is really showing the world is that when important people are in their city, they can give those people priority as if they were an emergency vehicle, and they can do so discretely. People might complain if police officers started waving through businessmen and politicians, but nobody can complain about the light changing, and there is no need for rich people to attach flashers to their cars.
Palm trees and 8
You can already pay to drive over the limit, it's called a fine :)
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
It's...
D. Traffic for Londoners and visitors will be a nightmare. But olympic athletes, officials and VIPS have designated lanes all over London that will be kept free for them to get around quickly.
Fines for using these lanes without a permit are £200. Even for cyclists - which will be interesting, as London cyclists mostly disregard traffic laws and ordinarily are not dealt with.
It already is. Last week Tuesday, the A406 was closed for 24 hours because of an accident. This happened very close to the Olympic park. The emergency services have no plan at all for handling traffic accidents which are absolutely certain to happen, however, they have Rapier missiles (what could possibly go wrong?) in case of terrorist attacks! and sonic cannons in case of Somali Pirates (we have a few rivers, and quite a lot of Somali run Internet cafes in East London, so it is not impossible one of them may launch a ship-born act of piracy on the Olympics, but I think the take-away food is probably a bigger risk.