Does anyone know anyone in the City of Vienna, Austria, who may know who made this traffic signal data request? It was rejected on the claim releasing open signal timing data would be a security vulnerability: ifg-umlaufzeiten-final_konvertiert_geschwaerzt - FragDenStaat.at
If they are interested, I’d like to get in touch to ask if they followed up and were successful eventually, or perhaps help them.
I also built Better Intersections, a crowdsourced signal timing map which heavily uses OSM data, is open source (AGPL-3.0), and releases the data openly too (I certainly need to do some maintenance/performance improvements on this site).
I hope this is not too far off topic of open map data to make this post; if it is, feel free to remove it.
From what I have heared through connections to the city planning department:
I think they also fear that people will be able see how bad some intersections are actually for pedestrians. Local residents could then see the data and demand change now that it is fact that the crossing time is too short or the waiting time too long. Not all people in the City Management like the idea to share this data publicly, as still a lot in there like to make life for cars easier. It is a pretty political problem. Also the police is intrested in keeping car traffic flowing even if it makes live for other people on the road a lot harder than it should be.
Once these pro-car people are finally replaced with people that actually care about walkability and cycling the new ones will probably try to release the dataset ASAP to be able to easily point out problems within the pedestrian/bicycle timings on traffic lights.
There are some traffic lights that have like insane times that are myself measured almost 7 minutes wait and have like 5 seconds green for a pedestrian. Eg: Node: 4860175958 | OpenStreetMap
So basicially TLDR:
A Main problem preventing releasing the data is politics and conflicting intrests AFAIK ;)
they also fear that people will be able see how bad some intersections are … It is a pretty political problem … the police is intrested in keeping car traffic flowing … Main problems preventing releasing the data is politics and conflicting intrests AFAIK ;)
It is unfortunate this context sounds almost exactly like the planning/political environment in Sydney, Australia.
Local residents could then see the data and demand change now that it is fact that the crossing time is too short or the waiting time too long
That’s the goal!
Once these pro-car people are finally replaced with people that actually care about walkability and cycling the new ones will probably try to release the dataset ASAP to be able to easily point out problems within the pedestrian/bicycle timings on traffic lights.
Apart from hard-won (infrequent) breakthroughs, progress sometimes feels like a long and exhausting waiting game…
There is a project here “C-ITS: Mit einem ESP32 Ampeln, Straßenbahnen und Autos tracken” or " C-ITS: Tracking Traffic Lights, Trams, and Cars with an ESP32"
So basically track with an ESP32 traffic lights and public transport and even cars and show them on https://opentrafficmap.org/
Many traffic lights in Graz now support C-ITS and transmit data every second regarding the exact configuration of the lanes, the current status of the signals, and when the next phase is expected.
That sounds fitting for this request, doesn’t it?
@geologist has more informations about this, as far as i know.
FWIW from what I have heard in my time as “Bezirksrat” (district council member), the company providing the traffic light control hardware doesn’t give the city access to it, but charges an absolute fortune to re-program the traffic lights. This was the argument why many of our proposals to adjust the timing of traffic lights were rejected, because it is too expensive (if I remember correctly, we are talking multiple tens of thousands of Euros per crossing). I thus find it quite plausible that the city doesn’t have access to that data or any kind of interface to access it.
the company providing the traffic light control hardware doesn’t give the city access to it, but charges an absolute fortune to re-program the traffic lights.
That is an absurd situation!
If anyone knows of any government-operated open data schemes on signal timing around the world, please add a sentence in here!