SCATS personalities for each NSW intersection

#1

My goal: I want to reduce the time pedestrians spend waiting at pedestrian crossing. I think there are intersections where pedestrians needlessly wait.

NSW uses a system called SCATS to control traffic light timings, as described in https://www.rms.nsw.gov.au/business-industry/partners-suppliers/documents/technical-manuals/rtatc106b.pdf . Each intersection has a “personality”, which is the logic/rules engine that controls when movements/phases occur. These personalities are flexible, but some are standardised, as described in https://www.rms.nsw.gov.au/documents/business-industry/partners-and-suppliers/guidelines/complementary-traffic-material/tstn021-tables.pdf .

I plan to take this data, and OpenStreetMap, and write a tool to find intersections that have inefficient tables/personalities, then propose that the personalities be updated.

Please could the SCATS personalities be made open data?

#2

Hi @tom, thanks for you’re inquiry. Unfortunately we don’t have that information available to be published as open data. Have you had a look at the website https://www.scats.com.au to see if they have what you need? Or were you after the logic rules for each specific intersection and how they’re set up around the city?

Thanks,
Alex

#3

Thanks for your prompt response.

Or were you after the logic rules for each specific intersection and how they’re set up around the city?

Yes, I want the logic rules for each specific intersection. This is what controls the pedestrian lights phases behaviour.

In the best case, all or almost traffic lights personality rules logic use the standard library macros (there’s one for each Movement Table defined in “Specification of Pedestrian Movement Operation - Pedestrian Movement Tables”). In that case I don’t need the full logic and instead would be happy with just the mapping from intersection to Movement Table.

For example that dataset might look like:

Intersection ID,Intersection Latitude, Intersection Longitude,Movement Table
foo,33.8688,151.2093,“Table 11: Pedestrian Movement - Unprotected”
bar,33.8643,151.2087,“Table 21: Pedestrian Movement - Walk for Green”

However, in the worst case, few traffic lights personality logic rules use the standard library macros. In that case the mapping from intersection to Movement Table would be insufficient because it would not include many intersections. Rather, I would prefer the each intersection’s logic rules, with which I’ll have to do something more elaborate to analyse the behaviour.

In that case the data set might be a zip file containing files:

  • intersection-foo-rules.scata
  • intersection-foo-metadata.txt
  • intersection-bar-rules.scata
  • intersection-bar-metadata.scata

Do you know whether this data falla under the remit of Transport for NSW Open Data?

If not, do you know who/how I’d get this data from?