Morgan from Traffic Signals
Download MP3We know our services and programs impact you, so let's talk about them. Together, we'll learn from the people behind the scenes and get to know our city a little better. From the city of Winnipeg, this is Our City, Our Podcast.
Natalie:This podcast is recorded in Treaty 1 territory, the home and traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Ininew, and Dakota peoples, and the national homeland of the Red River Metis. We acknowledge that our drinking water comes from Shoal Lake Forty First Nation in Treaty 3 territory.
Tamara:Hi, I'm Natalie. And I'm Tamara.
Natalie:Well, Tamara, traffic lights are one of those things, hey? We use them every day. Mhmm. But how often do you think about them?
Tamara:But of course, like every topic on this podcast, Natalie, there's a person and often a whole team who are thinking about signals day in and day out.
Natalie:Morgan Glasgow is the supervisor of the City of Winnipeg's traffic signal system, and he's taken a short red light on his daily task to give us the green light to learn how the city's traffic signals really work.
Tamara:Walk sign is on for all crossings. Morgan, thank you so much for joining us today. We all experience traffic lights, you know, every day. You really can't escape them though. How big of a part of your life are they?
Morgan:Ginormous. I went to school to be a traffic engineer. I started at City and Traffic Signals, moved to a different group, I'm back at Traffic Signals now. Everyone goes through traffic signals, whether driving as a pedestrian, on a bike, getting to your bus stop. So, it's every day of my life.
Morgan:There's one small set of signals between my house and the park. So, whenever I'm taking my two kids to the park, we're going walking through the traffic signals.
Tamara:What lesson do you give them? Like, do you how do you talk about that with them?
Morgan:My wife is also a transportation engineer, so they were bombarded with traffic signals trivia from a young age. So pretty early on recognizing like, if you're crossing the street, wait for the white walk person to tell you when it's safe to start crossing. Green lights, red lights. We recently my daughter, we switched her her car seat from backwards facing to forward facing. So now when she's asking why we're stopped, we can say, well, what do you think?
Morgan:Look out the windshield. One of her first Halloween costumes, my daughter dressed up as a traffic signal to go trick or treating. This was probably when she was around two. So the whole family is very invested in traffic signals.
Tamara:What do you like about them?
Morgan:I like I shouldn't say I like I love that it has a direct impact. My work has a direct impact on day to day life. I think there's a lot of engineering roles where your work may not be directly visible or directly impacting so many people on their day to day, whether for the better or worse. So that's one of the things I like about them. And the ability to kind of make changes, observe those changes on your drive or bike to work, and make tweaks that you think are needed.
Natalie:So as we get into this Signals chat, it might help to start with why this could be a very unique Winnipeg conversation. In our city's past, Winnipeg made a different decision than many other North American cities, and that was to not build freeways. So Morgan, how does the road network here shape the use of traffic signals?
Morgan:Yeah. Good point. So in the fifties, the trend for cities was to build freeways like you said, interstate highway in The States. Winnipeg uniquely does not have any freeways going to our downtown. So that also means lots of our bigger streets have traffic signals, but it also happens that lots of our bigger streets are also the streets where people gather in communities.
Morgan:So good examples of that would be like Provence or Osborne Village, Cordon areas where there are a lot of restaurants, lot of businesses, a lot of people, pedestrians, but at the same time we need to rely on those to get people into downtown or wherever they need to be. So that's the trade off. Kind of around North America, the trend has shifted now and a lot of cities are removing those freeways that are downtown. Because when they were built they eliminated some neighborhoods and there's a lot of discussion about that. But Winnipeg, we don't really have to deal with that because we never put them in in the first place.
Morgan:But like I said, we're mixing a lot of traffic and kind of high heavy pedestrian areas because of it.
Tamara:Now the first traffic signal was installed a hundred years ago actually this year, Higgins and Maine. But traffic signals a century ago looked very different to what we're seeing today. What do we know about Winnipeg's very first signal and how far really has technology changed since then?
Morgan:We don't know a ton. There's a couple of news articles that have been clipped and there are you can read them on the city's website. The first traffic signal was installed at Main And Higgins in 1926. Totally different from what we see nowadays on the streets. It was just a sign that alternated between stop and go.
Morgan:Very clear. Yep. Yep. And then a month later, they put two more intersections by, I guess, where the Eaton's Building was downtown. So Portage and Donald and Portage and Hargrave.
Morgan:But if you look at pictures from the streets back then, super wide right of ways, and then a mix of streetcars, cars, horses, people crossing the street all over the place. So it was absolute chaos. I can't imagine it worked too well.
Natalie:Now, similar to a musician, the the world of traffic signals is governed by timing. And when you are timing traffic signals across the city, tell us about the rhythm. You know, how are you finding, also importantly, a balance?
Morgan:Yeah. It's the main balance would be between kind of efficiency and safety. On basic signal timing, we run three different signal times timing plans during the day, One during the AM rush hour, one during the PM, and then one kind of off peak. Sometimes we have overnight plans as well. So each of those plans considers the different traffic volumes throughout the day.
Morgan:In the morning we might prioritize traffic getting into downtown. In the PM rush hour prioritize traffic getting out of downtown. But on top of that, we're prioritizing safety. And it's really a balance between efficiency between different approaches as well as safety, making sure that everyone can get through the intersection safely, and that's cars, bikes, and pedestrians.
Natalie:So on behalf of anyone who is moving through the city right now, why can't you just give everyone long green lights?
Morgan:We get that a lot. Signal timing plans, they're kind of governed by the cycle length. And that's the time that it takes to serve every single phase at an intersection. Best practice is to keep those cycle lengths as short as possible while still maintaining and balancing delay. We try to keep cycle lengths at City Winnipeg around two minutes at heavy volume roads like Abenogi, Mckenna or Keniston.
Morgan:Those cycle lengths probably creep up to maybe two and a half minutes.
Natalie:And this is for all sides. So they'll go through the entire cycle.
Morgan:Two minutes to serve all the crosswalks, all the left turn signals, all the demand at the intersection. Going beyond that, you see bigger delays on the side streets, the turning lanes start to overflow. And really thinking about in winter at least, pedestrians are waiting to cross the street, standing on the side. We want to keep those in check. Also interestingly, after a while, a green light starts to become a little bit inefficient as drivers are distracted.
Morgan:The space or time between vehicles gets a little bit longer. And so it's a bit diminishing returns the longer the green light is.
Tamara:A great example of striking that right balance comes to mind with another great anniversary we have here in Winnipeg. It's one year out since the opening of Port Au Domain to pedestrians. Now you say this is a project you are proud of. What do you see at that iconic intersection today?
Morgan:Yeah. I'm very proud of this. And I think the two reasons are how safe it is for users, as well as how efficient, how we've seen pretty minimal impact to delay from opening those crosswalks. And I mentioned safety because there's a lot of concerns that there'd be pedestrian collisions once it was opened. Such a big intersection, everyone's distracted.
Morgan:But the way we designed it is that there's very few conflicts with those crosswalks. There's only one left turn allowed. It's fully protected, doesn't conflict with the crosswalk. And there's the two right turns that go over crosswalks. We have LPIs at those crosswalks.
Natalie:That's a leading pedestrian interval.
Morgan:Yes. Better than that, actually, it's a leading through interval. So we give green through arrows to not delay any of the through movements. So it just holds back the turning vehicles. So far it's been open for a year.
Morgan:There's around 4,000 pedestrians that use that intersection every single day along with the 75,000 vehicles and I think somewhere over a thousand buses. So very proud of that intersection. Funny story. I was out there when it was opening and it was the one time probably where people were taking pictures of our traffic signal electricians as they were taking the bags off the pedestrian signal heads. That's a very low profile job, kind of out of the public eye, and this is probably the only time those workers had the public kind of standing at the base of the ladder taking pictures of them.
Natalie:It's your day. Totally. You know, and so unlike that first intersection at Higgins And Main, there's now this surprising amount of technology that that is is going on behind the scenes. And so it got that moment as people were taking photos. I've caught myself, you know, you're sitting at the light, you're aware of your surroundings, you look up, you wonder, wait, what is that white panel, or what is that box?
Natalie:Tell us more about the technologies that are now involved with with Signals in Winnipeg.
Morgan:Yeah, probably the biggest change since Higgins And Main is that all the intersections are connected through the cell network. So we can make changes from the office. And to allow us to do that, there's also around 200 traffic signal cameras around the city. So that gives us the ability to make changes, see what's happening, and tweak those changes or respond to incidents on the road. If we see that there's a collision, we can make timing changes on the fly to try and alleviate some of that congestion and then put it back to normal afterwards.
Morgan:But beyond that connectivity infrastructure that's on the roadway, we have different types of detection we use. Traditionally it was loops embedded in the pavement, but nowadays we use radar and video detection for vehicles.
Natalie:Hold up. Yeah. Tell us a little more about those those loops. What do you mean?
Morgan:You can see them on the road as you're driving. We usually have two before the stop line. If you're on a side street, the major street won't typically have much detection. And they're kind of diamond shaped cutouts in the pavement.
Natalie:They're still out there, some of them.
Morgan:They're still out there. We're slowly replacing them.
Natalie:Okay.
Morgan:In the pavement as you're driving, there could be cutouts, diamond cutouts approaching the stop line. We typically have them in sets of two for some redundancy. When your vehicle drives over those loops, we call them, there's a signal that goes to the traffic signal controller and tells essentially the controller that there's demand on this side street, this movement, and to serve it when that time comes in the cycle. Another improvement that we're doing is around bike detection. So loops are not great for bikes because bikes just do not have enough metal in their bodies typically to trigger them.
Morgan:For bike detection we use push buttons. We use radar video detection. And for pedestrians, we also have push buttons for the side streets here. No push buttons downtown.
Natalie:Okay. And when you're talking about first piece, the remote connectivity, and you can quickly on the fly adjust a signal because of a crash. Are there other kind of real world scenarios where you're you're making changes?
Morgan:A few. One of them is construction, whether we make proactive changes and knowing expecting what drivers are going to do. Other times construction starts and we kind of see where what the reaction is, where deterring traffic is going, and we can make real time changes for construction. Additionally, big events. We have special timing plans that we put in place for them.
Morgan:So bomber games, concerts or Jets games downtown. We have special timing plans scheduled to try and get people to these events and clear out of downtown or the Bomber Stadium afterwards. On top of kind of event day special plans, we also monitor traffic during rush hours. So, someone from my team starts the day early and another timing engineer starts later and we make sure that we're kind of monitoring rush hour traffic. When there's incidents, we speak with our TMC operators who
Natalie:So the traffic management center?
Morgan:Yep. They manage all the cameras in the city. And when we spot these incidents, we can see them on the camera. We'll adjust the signal timing to try and alleviate the congestion from the stall, the collision, the new construction that's starting up, active focusing on that during rush hours.
Natalie:And these are eyes on the streets every day.
Tamara:Yeah. Going back to those loops, I think they've kind of led to a lot of urban myths around traffic signals, people flashing high beams. The loops, you back up, go forward, pretend like there's more than one vehicle there, hammering those pedestrian buttons. Let's get the record straight here from you, the expert. What are those biggest myths you hear and any truth to them?
Morgan:So the driving forwards and backwards over loops, I'd say sometimes it may work if you stop too early ahead of the loops and you're not getting detected. But for the most part, with video or or radar detection here, that's not a concern. Even with loops, it shouldn't really be happening. And the other one, using push buttons or hammering on those buttons if you're a pedestrian or a cyclist. It doesn't make them come on faster, but it will make them come on in the first place.
Tamara:So should you get out of your vehicle, hit the button, and go back in?
Morgan:Only if you want a really long green light. At intersections where we have push buttons for pedestrians across the street, those need to be used in order to bring on the pedestrian phase at the intersection. Otherwise, it could serve just a very short green light for very little side street demand. We have removed pretty much all the useless ones in the city. So they're not just for the audible signals.
Morgan:They're not just for extra long green lights. They are to trigger and bring on those pedestrian phases.
Tamara:So if you are walking and you see the button, you should press it. You shouldn't just, like, wait and, like, you should
Morgan:Only if you're going to cross the street. Yes.
Tamara:Got it.
Morgan:Yes.
Natalie:Okay. I've seen this one out here. Folks who are sitting at a red light and they start flashing the high beams, maybe my understanding is maybe they think they can can trick that light into thinking they're an emergency service vehicle.
Morgan:No. No. Not quite. No. That doesn't work.
Morgan:Honking doesn't work.
Tamara:You've heard it all. On the topic of emergency vehicles, though, there is more to talk about there because there is technology that does support them, and that's ever changing.
Morgan:Yeah. This is this is a big project this year. Working with WFPS Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service in 2024, we installed a pilot project for emergency vehicle preemption. Essentially identifying approaching emergency vehicles and giving them a green light. Winnipeg has had a very old system in place.
Morgan:At most fire halls there may be a push button in the garage that the first responders can press before leaving the station and it gives green lights at those intersections directly around the station. We had the pilot in 2024 in Osborne Village. We had it rolled out at 17 intersections and 14 vehicles. Very successful. And we are rolling it out much broader base around the city starting this year, this summer.
Natalie:And so that signal's coming out of the fire truck itself?
Morgan:Yeah. So it's a combination of GPS and radio. The radio is more as a backup. But we're able to design detection zones. So when these emergency vehicles enter these zones heading towards the intersection, can interrupt the normal operation of the lights and provide a green light for the fire truck or ambulance.
Morgan:But to work well, you need to give a lot of heads up because we want to let pedestrians finish safely crossing the street, then we need to transition to a green light in the right direction, and then we may need to give a long enough green light to clear out whatever cues in front of the fire truck waiting at the intersection.
Tamara:Have you heard from first responders about what impact this has when they're responding to a call?
Morgan:The funny thing is, lost people don't notice when they're hitting a lot of green lights. It's only when they hit red lights that it can be frustrating. Yes, we have heard some lots of positive feedback from the stations and drivers that were involved in the pilot, and we're looking forward to kind of rolling it out for the rest of the city.
Natalie:Brilliant. We've spent so much time talking about drivers, but there is this increased focus on pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, and of course, anyone with an accessibility need. This is another piece where things are evolving. And if you can tell us a little bit more about that.
Morgan:Yeah, there's been over the last decade or around there, there's been a much bigger focus on pedestrian safety, pedestrian accessibility, mobility. So one of those things, like you mentioned, leading pedestrian intervals, which give pedestrians a five second head start to start crossing the street before vehicles get their green light. Essentially, it just gets pedestrians out into the crosswalk more visible and has been proven to lead to better safety. In early twenty twenty five, we installed brand new signal timings throughout the entirety of downtown at 120 intersections. And as part of this, we rolled out LPIs at most of these intersections.
Morgan:I think 90 of them have LPIs. That was a huge improvement and we've heard lots of positive feedback about that. On top of that, downtown, you may notice, but we don't actually have any push buttons there. And so that just provides better accessibility to pedestrians that those pedestrian phases at these signalized intersections are always going to be served.
Natalie:Winnipeg's also a leader, is this right, in in some of these accessibility benchmarks or or extra tools?
Morgan:Winnipeg, in the last handful of years, we've reached 100% installation of audible pedestrian signals at signalized crosswalks in the city. And since we accomplished that, we've had to kind of move the goalpost to keep improving. At new installations, we have more accessible push buttons that are touch free. They provide a rubber tactile feature that kind of vibrates when it's time to start walking. And they also provide audible tones to help people identify where that push button is on the pole.
Tamara:So going back to the audible features, if waiting there, you might hear different chirps. What do those signal?
Morgan:Yeah, we have two main tones, chirp chirp and a cuckoo signal or audible tone. Those are used for crossing different directions. And those are consistent across the city, but those provide people with vision impairments to understand where it's safe to cross, what crosswalks are active. And yeah, like I said, those are rolled out at every intersection in the city and have been for a number of years now.
Tamara:Is it best to just name it? Like, there's that tension between moving traffic quickly and making streets safer. So how do these decisions factor into your work?
Morgan:Yeah. Yeah, it's a big one. Our number one priority is safety at intersections. And it just so happens that a lot of these safety improvements may add some delays. So some examples would be leading pedestrian intervals.
Morgan:We have all red intervals after every single amber light. There's a period where it's red for every single approach. Those were not always installed, so those of course add some delay to the whole intersection. Whenever we add a fully protected left turn signal, that eats a bit more time into the available cycle length. And then another big one is bike signals now.
Morgan:We are as we're building more and more bike facilities, we want to make sure that these facilities are for all ages and abilities. And part of that means we need to make sure these crossings are safe. And if there's high conflicting turning movements across these bike crossings, sometimes we need to protect those with either a leading bike interval like an LPI, but for bikes, or fully protecting that phase so that it's separated from vehicles. And at those ones especially, it's a balance for cyclists who may not want to wait for their specific bike signal phase versus people who want that extra comfort, that extra safety factor, or maybe biking with their kids in the trailer behind who want to be able to safely cross the street.
Natalie:But maybe just to wrap that up, back to that tension of moving people quickly, making streets safer, looking at, you know, the bigger picture over the last ten years. Where are we at?
Morgan:Yeah. So ten years ago, or around when we got cell connection at every intersection, it allowed us to make large scale changes faster. So this is talking about looking at a big road like Pembina or Portage and synchronizing or coordinating those lights. So that involves building a whole model of the streets, one model for each different timing plan, updating the volumes because traffic volumes change over time with new developments, new suburbs being built, and kind of rebuilding, optimizing those traffic signals. So, we did this before, but it was just a much slower process.
Morgan:So having this connectivity at intersections has allowed us to really take this on ten years ago. We try to get around every five years to every corridor to reoptimize. Some of them around downtown maybe stay the same or similar. Whereas roads, Route 90 could have much different traffic patterns due to all the development along there. So it's at these times that we try to re optimize the signal timings, and that's coordinating, synchronizing the lights to hopefully get traffic flowing a little bit better.
Natalie:And then the other really interesting part about your work is that you actually can contest and tweak ideas in real time. What have you learned from pilot projects like the Pedestrian Scramble and why pilots are so important?
Morgan:I think I said this was one of my favorite things about the job. But, yeah, it allows us to be bold. It allows us to make changes that if it doesn't work out, we can just go back to the way it was or try something new. In the last year, we installed a pedestrian scramble pilot in the Exchange District. It was a kind of brand new setup.
Morgan:We haven't had one of these in Winnipeg. It's been used kind of sparingly across the country and other cities too.
Natalie:Quickly describe for for those that have never encountered a scramble. What were you talking?
Morgan:A pedestrian scramble activates all the crosswalks at the same time while holding red lights for vehicles. So it allows pedestrians, in this case, we give enough time to make two crossings to get wherever they need to go without any conflicts for vehicles. The fun thing was here, we had to create a new audible tone because the North South and the East West crossings, you can't just have all of them jumbled on at the same time. So that was a lot of fun Coming up with the timings to actually make this work was a lot of fun for my team as well. Shout out to my team.
Tamara:How many times did you cross the intersection in testing?
Morgan:I was at a conference when it first opened, so I missed that actually. But yes, there's lots of testing also to make sure that the volume is okay for those messages that come across to see how people are using it. But again, being able to try different things, try different signal timing strategies to reduce delay for whatever
Natalie:it
Morgan:is that 's needed. Sometimes it's using longer cycle lengths, but not making pedestrians wait as long, maybe serving them faster, but maybe infrequently, if that makes sense.
Natalie:Right. And I imagine you're also watching to see if, you know, the traffic is backing up and there's something else you can
Morgan:Yeah. Yeah. Like when we installed all LPIs downtown or all the new single time plans downtown last year, there's a long period of watching the videos, observing the traffic, making little tweaks to make sure it's doing what we intended and keeping everyone flowing. So, I mean, I there's one saying that like all models are wrong, but some are useful. And that's definitely the case when it comes to simulating traffic and building traffic networks.
Morgan:So as much as you want to use kind of the optimized model's signal timing output, nothing's really better than watching, seeing how that operates and making tweaks based on real driver behavior.
Tamara:Okay, Morgan. Every city has its quirks. And I like the way you've put this in previous conversations. If you were hosting a bunch of North American experts on traffic signals, there is one you would take them to go see. Which one?
Morgan:An easy answer would be the U-turn signal at Kingsbury and McPhillips. It's a southbound U-turn signal. It's been there for over twenty years at this point. It's not something that's included in kind of the Canadian Traffic Engineer Bible, the MUTCDC. It's something that Manitoba had to specifically add to their regulations.
Morgan:But kind of similar to that, in St. Norbert, a couple years ago we installed a U-turn signal for buses. So it doesn't have the same green U-turn signal because it has a transit priority, the white line. It allows transit operators to make a U-turn from the far right lane And we give them, I think, twenty five seconds to make the turnaround on Pembina rather than having to kind of wiggle through the neighborhood to turn around. So that was fun.
Morgan:It took a lot of work. The detection part of it was a lot of work as well. But that's still something that I'm proud of and I think it's pretty neat.
Natalie:So but why does the McPhillips Kingsbury thing exist?
Morgan:There's no left turn here, so a normal left turn signal wouldn't work here. That U-turn there allows a lot of southbound drivers to turn around and be able to access all those approaches to the Garden City Mall there from the northbound lanes. Without that signal, there's not that many median openings for southbound drivers, and it can take them much further south if they want to access those businesses.
Tamara:Is there a reason why there aren't more U-turn signals around the city?
Morgan:Usually, left turn signals would be just as good. This is a weird case because Kingsbury is only westbound on that approach, so there is no no opportunity to turn left. Pretty much every other intersection, there's availability to turn left, and so it's just haven't really run into the same unique situation.
Natalie:Maybe we can close out with a similar sentiment to what we started with, which is traffic signals are something that everyone interacts with every day, and yet we also don't think about the people behind them. And we're wondering, what do you hope people listening today understand differently about traffic signals after hearing our conversation?
Morgan:I'd like people to understand that we have a really passionate team of signal timing engineers that work for the City of Winnipeg. They're passionate about making the roads better and safer for the entire city. Again, spoke earlier that one of the best parts about the job is seeing the local impact, seeing the changes happen. And it's very much the case that this team, everyone has that same benefit. We all see the traffic as we're biking or driving into work, and we're able to make changes that hopefully make it better for everyone.
Tamara:So before we give you the green light to go, we have one last question. One thing about Winnipeg that you want our listeners to know that you love doesn't have to be work related, but it can't be?
Morgan:I guess it's partially work related. I love how easy it is to get places in the city on a bike. So with a young family, we bike our kids to the forks, we bike our kids to a San Juan park to go get ice cream, to go visit friends. During the summer, we drive our vehicles very little. And that's something I love about Winnipeg.
Morgan:We're building new bike facilities every year, and they've just allowed great mobility for our family.
Natalie:Yeah. No. Shout out to the active transportation group that that we talked to a couple episodes back. Well, thanks so much, Morgan, for for joining us, and and we really learned a lot here. Thank you.
Morgan:Thank you.
Tamara:And from one transportation topic to another, next month, we're talking about what a lot of you are talking about, transit. We've experienced a big change.
Natalie:With the change comes questions. If you have questions that you want us to ask the transit folks, send us an email. We're over at city dash podcast at Winnipeg dot c a. Have a good one.
