Benefits gained by responsive and traffic adaptive systems in Sao Paulo

The city of Sao Paulo is the center of a huge metropolitan region, a point where the flows of national interests converge, with a fleet of four million vehicles and a public transportation system served by about nine thousand buses. The city also presents a discontinuous and irregular network of roads that result from a disorderly growth. In 1992, CET developed a study named "Sao Paulo Traffic Control Plan". The aim of this study was to determine, through the analysis of the cost/benefit ratio, the best control strategy for each signalised intersection of the city. From a comparative analysis among the results obtained in each area, it is noticed that Alvarenga St./Camargo St. is the one which presented the best performance with the implementation of the real time control system. The gain obtained by SCOOT on these roads is exceptional. SCOOT was able to handle these situations in a more efficient way than fixed time plans. SCOOT\´s implementation at Rio Branco Av./Norma Gianotti Av. also had a very significant gain.