And note Green Wave doesn’t generally work for buses: https://bathtrams.uk/green-wave-traffic-light-pre-emption-is-usually-only-done-for-trams-ie-not-buses-says-world-bank/
Green Wave Traffic Light Pre-emption means using a central self-learning traffic control computer to set traffic lights pre-emptively, such that a tram can proceed through rush hour traffic unimpeded. This does not mean simply turning lights green when the tram arrives – you need a whole centrally coordinated sequence of light changes ahead of the tram – reds on side junctions ahead to stop traffic entering the target tram line, and greens well ahead to clear traffic ahead.
You can see a video of this working in Brussels here where you can see the tram leading the congestion in.
Some other videos here:
PTV Vissim: A Roundabout with Tram Priority
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtxEZINCpCw
This is a video that PTV have created showing a roundabout with tram priority. This is an indication of how priority may occur.
Tram priority in VISSIM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-zomchrCos
Other videos:
The computer knows where the tram is and where it is heading, and so well ahead of the tram it sets lights ahead of the tram to green, and for side roads ( say the exit of the A46 for a tram coming from Bathford) all the lights are set to red, to prevent cars getting into the road in front of the tram, until it has passed, so that cars that would have been queued in front of the tram have cleared.
In fact this is already done in Bath where the lights from the bypass to the London Road are set to queue the traffic into Bath on the slip roads.
The effect of this is that the cars end up following the tram in, and further more, the cars are not delayed for a longer time, because they queue outside the city, rather than inside, but for the same amount of time. This has been demonstrated over many years in cities such as Zurich where cars wait outside the city, not inside.
How Green Wave traffic light pre-emption would work for a tram coming in from Bathford via Batheaston. ( note the same applies for a route from Odd Down to Bath)
Note – this is meant as an example to show the principle – how it might work in practice may be different
Green Wave distance – this is the distance ahead of a tram that the “last car” in the traffic queue ahead has to be so that the tram is unimpeded by traffic during its journey.
Assume we wish the tram to travel from the Batheaston roundabout on the bypass unrestricted by traffic until it arrives at say the Bathwick Street traffic lights, a distance of 1 mile, then the calculation of the Green Wave distance is quite easy:
Assume average speed of traffic (at rush hour) is about 10 miles per hour ( Google maps indicates 5 – 14 m/h) (The Green Wave computer would continuously adjust the calculation below according to actual traffic speeds.)
Average tram speed is 25 km/h including stops = 15 m/h ( which it is in Croydon for the on-street running portion)
The control computer will pre-emptively adjust the lights as below so that well before the tram approaches the A46 roundabout from Batheaston, the Green Wave traffic light control computer has set:
- the slip roads lights off the A46 to red,
- the London Road and other lights onwards to Bathwick Street traffic lights to green,
- all side roads lights onto the London road are at red from the roundabout up to the “last car” in the queue.
This will mean that there is a clear space ahead of the tram from the roundabout to “the last car” in the traffic queue.
We want the computer to set these lights so that when the tram actually catches up with the “last car” they will both have reached the Bathwick Street traffic lights which is 1 mile from the roundabout on the A46 simultaneously.
If this is the case because there is no traffic in front of the tram it will proceed at 15m/h and take 4 minutes to get to the Bathwick Street traffic lights.
But in 4 minutes, the “last car” at 10 miles/h will have travelled 4/60 x 10 = 0.67 mile, therefore the pre-emption computer needs to have set the lights as mentioned earlier so that just as the tram arrives at the roundabout, the last car is 1 – 0.67 miles = 0.33 miles from the Roundabout.
For this length of road. 0.33 miles to have cleared from the roundabout, then since the “last car” is moving at 10 mph, the traffic light pre-emption ie setting green ahead and setting side roads to red, should have started at the roundabout 0.33 x 60/10 = 2 minutes before the tram arrives.
The important point to note here is that this will not delay cars. Instead of slowly moving in the London road traffic, they will be pausing on the bypass, and the other the side roads. Once the tram has passed they will follow the tram in, and arrive at the Bathwick Street lights, just in time to catch up with the last car, which is where they would have been anyway without the pre-emption, so they will be no worse off than before.
Once the tram has passed, normal traffic light sequences will carry on as before for 4 minutes until the next tram is due.
This ability for trams to move quickly into the city will make them attractive for drivers from Bathford / Batheaston, and the proposed park and ride built above the dual carriageway, and this will take about 25% of the cars off the road (from other UK tram install’s experience) thus the actual situation will have improved for not only the tram passengers but also those who still wish to drive, since there will be less cars than before.
We have assumed in this example for simplicity that there are no stops between the roundabout and the Bathwick lights, however it would be necessary to have perhaps a couple of stops, and these would be located conveniently at traffic lights – one obvious one being the Morrisons Supermarket and another at the St Savours Road junction, which would permit the pre-emption time to be reduced from 4 minutes, but this is a question of detailed design – the above example is to explain the principle.
It is also clear why this cannot be applied to buses. For this to work for buses, because you need three times as many buses, you would need three times as many pre-emptions and this would confer very little advantage since it would essentially be the same traffic light sequences we have now; furthermore there would not be the shift from cars to trams.
Academic references:
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2018/6062878/
A Dynamic Approach from…https://web.archive.org/web/20060128221925/http://www.its.umn.edu/sensor/2003/spring/signals.html
Dynamic route clearance goes beyond intersection-based signal pre-emption by managing the entire route that the vehicle takes from dispatch to emergency scene. In a dynamic system, a network monitoring module continually gathers traffic information and passes these data to a route selection subsystem. The subsystem then calculates an optimal route based on current conditions. As the emergency vehicle travels along this route, its location is monitored by the central system, which intervenes in signal timing as appropriate.
See also: http://www.its.umn.edu/sensor/2003/spring/signals.html
