If you’re lucky, you got home a while ago, and if you drive into Boston, chances are you were stuck in traffic at some point today. And every day for that matter. Languishing in bumper-to-bumper traffic five days a week can feel as though we are at the mercy of chance-- and bad driving, but as WGBH’s Cristina Quinn tells us, Boston’s rush hour is more orchestrated than you may think.
If it feels as though traffic has gotten worse—it’s because it has. A recent report found that Greater Boston commuters sat in traffic for an extra 64 hours last year, making Boston the 6th worst city in the nation for rush hour traffic. That’s the upshot of the economy doing better—more people are working, which means more people are driving, and throw in the lowest gas prices we’ve seen in a decade, and we have a commuting nightmare. So I thought I’d head to the place where they all try to make it a little less awful—the Traffic Management Center in City Hall.
We leave WGBH in Brighton at 3:30 p.m. and take only Boston roads to get there, and at first, it’s not so bad. Commonwealth Ave. traffic by Boston University is surprisingly light, but once we get closer to Beacon Hill, things start to get ugly. A fire truck charges by and a few brazen drivers make u-turns on Beacon St. There’s construction on Bowdoin St, and then suddenly, everything comes to a crawl that continues onto Cambridge St. After 50 minutes, I finally arrive. Yes, 6.5 miles took almost an hour.
On the 7th floor of City Hall, traffic engineers in the city’s transportation department have a bird’s eye view of the soul-crushing congestion many of us experience daily-- thanks to cameras and sensors installed at 800 city intersections. 560 of those are connected back to the central computer here.
Engineer John Monacelli quickly types away on his computer.
“We do live adjustments on the signals. We pull up a monitor and each individual monitor is correlated to a signal within the city”, Monacelli said. “We have a certain number of them around the city on a central control system, so I can pull them up and see a number of metrics of data for that signal.”
Senior traffic engineer Keith Bynum is focusing on the gnarly nexus of Atlantic Ave, the onramp to the 93 North and Seaport Ave. I ask him how bad it is out there.
“I’m not seeing anything unusual,” Bynum said. “This is the ramp to 93 northbound and Atlantic and it’s very common for this ramp to back up onto downtown streets and we try to make a little bit of adjustments.”
Bynum zooms in closely on the traffic, and when asked if he ever see people’s faces filled with rage, he shakes his head and smiles.
“No, I don’t go that close. Try to give them a little bit of privacy.”
How long a light stays green—or red, is based on the data gathered from these systems. The city this year also started using data from the WAZE smartphone traffic app. The Traffic Management Center makes an average 128 real-time adjustments to traffic signals daily, though on some days, these engineers are making signal adjustments upwards of 800 times. And there’s a reason for that—there’s just more of us.
(Scene change to John DeBenedictis and Don Burgess interview)
John DeBenedictis is the Director of Engineering for the Boston Transportatio Department. He said volume has gone up considerably because of private development.
“The seaport was just a bunch of parking lots a few years ago and now it’s the Innovation District. That’s one area that we’ve noticed an uptick in traffic volume. And also pedestrian volume and bicycle volume throughout the city,” said DeBenedictis. “I would say we spend at least half our time with pedestrian timing. It’s about moving people around. If we make an adjustment on vehicle time, it may take time away from pedestrians.”
Supervising Traffic Engineer Don Burgess says people always ask him why Boston’s street traffic flow can’t be like New York City.
“And the thing is, I can take any two streets-- I can make it like New York but the thing is we have perpendicular streets that are carrying just as much traffic.” Burgess said.
As for what the future of traffic management holds, one thing’s for certain—traffic will get worse.
“It always has,” Burgess said. “There’s more people, more cars.”
