Vivian Lay

The space part is pretty simple.

Basically, every car, bus, bicycle, and pedestrian is competing for the same fixed space on the roads.

And the reality is that engineers cannot do much to expand that space.

But they can work with time.

And that's where their special algorithms come in.

There is so much data collected from those sensors embedded in the pavement.

And it reveals stuff like rush hour patterns and holiday surges and what a Wednesday on the road looks like versus a Sunday.

And the algorithms crunch through all that information and then translate it into precisely timed traffic lights.

That sounds like this increasingly sort of brain-breaking math problem, like how you synchronize across that many signals and how you make this intersection flow smoothly without creating chaos.

That sounds so hard.

Right.

What I hear you saying is that it's collective and there's also something a bit utilitarian about it.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about this as it's this highly engineered system.

There's algorithms, there's lights, there's wires, but ultimately it is about people's time.

It's actually very human.

When we come back, 99PI producer Vivian Lay visits the ATSAC control room.

Once she's there, she hacks into the system and screws up traffic across L.A.

in order to facilitate the movement of a huge amount of stolen gold.

Just kidding.

She just wants to figure out what's up with her least favorite intersection, the Fairfax asterisk.