"If you want to save the planet, start by fixing the traffic lights"

Cascadia - Articles/News: If you want to save the planet, start by fixing the traffic lights

While not a panacea, technology offers immediate solutions. Department of Transportation studies, for example, show that deploying traffic light "signal optimization technologies" such as "adaptive signaling" and "traffic responsive signaling" reduces fuel consumption by 10 percent to 15 percent. With nearly 76 percent of vehicle-miles driven on urban streets, a 15 percent reduction in fuel translates to saving 19.3 billion gallons of fuel a year. With all due respect to the hybrid crowd, those real, immediate savings are substantially more than would be saved if we could replace every one of the 41.5 million SUVs on the road with a similar SUV hybrid. That's because the savings in gas is relatively modest between the two when compared with the fuel that can be saved by making all the cars on the road more efficient.