...and it turns out he's a jovial traffic engineer named Bill Shao.
During his trip to Los Angeles a couple of months ago, StreetFilms' Clarence Eckerson Jr. took a tour of Los Angeles' Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control and was surprised to find it wasn't nearly as boring as he thought and actually had some lessons for traffic controllers around the country. In his own words,
First off, one of the things that makes ATSAC so unique is that its oneof the only traffic systems in the entire country that is publiclyowned. ATSAC was started in 1984 to help move traffic around theColiseum during the Olympics; since then it has grown to over 3,000 ofL.A.'s 4,100 signalized intersections, some of them incredibly complex.The technology is so advanced that even on its busiest days the controlroom only requires a few people present to run it.
