Nearly every light in the city of Richmond is getting a new time for the first time in five years.
Why it’s important: The growth of Richmond and the pandemic have changed how we live and how we get around. Now, the tools that tell us how to do this in a safe way need to be updated.
What’s going on: A $1.8 million federal grant is paying to change the times of all but 80 of the city’s 480 traffic lights.
This includes 115 lights south of the James River and 285 lights north of the river.
The work began on March 10, and it should be done by next spring.
The news is being driven by: Michael Sawyer, a city transportation engineer, told Axios that the city tries to change the timing of lights every few years or as money allows. But the number of people living in places like Scott’s Addition, Manchester, and downtown has made it more important to update.
Plus: Sawyer says that a lot of people still work from home in Richmond, but when they do go to the office, it’s much later than it was before the pandemic.
• Sawyer says that traffic levels at 5 p.m. are back to what they were before the pandemic. This means that traffic lights set for morning commuters between 7 and 9 a.m. no longer need to be able to handle the same number of cars.
The traffic centre is run by the city’s friendly traffic operations engineer, Enrique Burgos. Photo by Karri Peifer/Axios
Sure, but: When it comes to traffic lights in the city, getting cars to move quickly isn’t the main goal. Sawyer says it’s to keep people on foot safe.
• People, bikes, and public transportation all use the roads in cities in different ways than they do in counties.
Zoom in: Take Broad Street and a car coming from Henrico and going east into the city. If a car is going the speed limit, most of the lights in Henrico will be green during that part of the trip. Sawyer says that timing the lights gets harder once a commuter gets to Richmond, especially in areas with a lot of people walking, like Lombardy near VCU.
Sawyer says that pedestrians will only wait for about 60 seconds before they get tired of waiting and cross anyway, so traffic engineers have to take that into account when planning the timing of the lights.
The next step: Over the next year, most of the retiming will be done remotely from the city’s Traffic Control Center in City Hall, which is where 95% of the lights are managed.
