Metro

City gets street smart

The perpetually clogged heart of Manhattan is getting a state-of-the-art bypass operation — with city engineers now directing Midtown traffic flow by typing a few keys in a Queens control room.

Mayor Bloomberg yesterday launched the first-of-its-kind, real-time, congestion-busting system, which allows the engineers to control traffic lights remotely.

He hailed it as the greatest traffic innovation since the city’s grid system, saying engineers with the city Department of Transportation will use data from live street feeds to battle gridlock at the very moment motorists are leaning on their horns and giving each other the one-fingered salute.

“They will be able to clear up Midtown traffic jams at the touch of a button,” Bloomberg said at the DOT traffic-control room in Long Island City.

Dubbed “Midtown in Motion,” the $1.6 million system relies on more than 100 motion detectors, dozens of cameras and data gathered from drivers’ E-ZPasses to compile immediate info on the most congested streets in the city.

That info is beamed wirelessly back to the windowless control room in Long Island City to the traffic engineers.

Not only will the DOT engineers get immediate notification of traffic backups — caused by anything from a single car crash to a meeting of the UN General Assembly — they’ll also be able to do something about it.

Armed with pocket protectors and algorithms on city traffic patterns, the engineers will analyze the info and decide whether to speed up or slow down the street’s signal changes.

Previously, the signal lights in the city could be wired only to change themselves at certain times of the day — like for rush hour — and weren’t able to be switched remotely.

The all-seeing DOT engineers can also decide to deploy traffic agents from their command center if the congestion gets particularly thorny.

“For too long, Midtown traffic was kind of like the weather. Everybody commented on it, but nobody seemed able to do anything about it,” said Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

“Today marks a new era in traffic technology.”

To kick off the new system, the city began gathering traffic information yesterday from a 110-square-block area — beginning at 42nd Street and up to 57th, bound by Second to Sixth avenues.

“This is the most congested part of New York City,” Bloomberg said.

After six months, the engineers will analyze the congestion data using GPS technology from the city’s taxis to see how it is working.

If the program is successful, officials will look into expanding it to other parts of the city. In a few weeks, the city will put the real-time traffic information on its Web site to make it available to the public.

Software developers also can use the real-time congestion information to create smartphone apps and computer programs to help people avoid traffic snarls. Cops and firefighters will also be able to use the information to respond to emergencies quicker.

Bloomberg — who said the city coughed up $1 million for the system while the feds paid the rest — was quick to caution that motorists shouldn’t expect miracles.

“I don’t want anybody to think that starting tomorrow morning, there will never be another traffic jam between Second and Sixth, 42nd to 57th,” he said. “That’s not the real world.”

But he and other city officials are hopeful that the new system will enable them to alleviate the worst of the congestion that’s costing the city an estimated $13 billion a year in revenue.

“Keeping traffic moving is vital to keeping our economy moving,” he said.

Additional reporting
by Kelsey Huebert and Helen Freund