Besides a growing population, construction, movie productions, and an influx of cultural events, over which the city has little control, there is also a series of traffic system shortcomings that contribute to the tie-ups. The first is the city's inability to identify problems in traffic signals when they arise. The city lacks sufficient staff to monitor all the intersections and must rely on citizen complaints to identify the vast majority of their problems. Traffic signal malfunctions can take two or three days to be identified and corrected, and they have been known to persist as long as 10 days, Mozdbar says. For that reason, engineers must manually reset the traffic signals.
Timing is another problem.
Each signal has its own clock, which regulates when the light changes color. If the clock is malfunctioning, the lights are no longer synchronized. Unfortunately, the system is not capable of alerting operators that the timing is off. The city's new traffic management center looks like the bridge of the USS Enterprise . The mission of the traffic management center and the upgrade is to remedy many of the existing system problems.