QUOTE (Exhausted @ Jan 14 2014, 11:22 PM)
Whilst we can all try and find someone to blame, there obviously isn't any expertise in WBC or with any other council that can manage traffic light control systems. They therefore have to sub it out but as part of that, manage the placement and functionality with their technical partner. Siemens are one of the major, if not the only, candidate capable of managing such a huge technical and logistic problem. Would we expect every traffic light set to have an engineer living round the corner.
I know that the Robin Hood lights were upgraded a couple of years ago but I don't know if that included the control box electronics. Siemens can only repair a system but if an upgrade is required, it is fairly certain that the agency responsible for that set of lights will have to put their hand in their coffers and find funding for a new control system. What peeves me is that the control system should sense that they have failed and perhaps switch all the lights to amber or switch them off. Trying to explain to your insurance company that you went over a red light and the idiot doing 50mph through a green light totalled your car might be a bit difficult and if you damaged somebody in that car the old bill would be very interested in apportioning blame.
I am aware of the logistics of it, but there are contracts (or should be) that are written up as part of the scope written up by the Council. In all likelyhood when they wanted to arrange a supplier (Siemens in this case) to maintain/manage/support their traffic light systems they would have put out a RFT basically stating what they want. As part of that would be a maintenance schedule should be means for emergency support, contingencies, EG what if something goes wrong, how long before an engineer can provide a workaround and then how long before the problem can be fixed. When companies come back with a Tender response and are selected then there should be some sort of get back.
Legally unfortunately you are not allowed to have a constant amber (which would otherwise provide a workaround).
There are "phases" EG red, red+amber, green, and then amber before being red again. There are actually laws and requirements on the amount of time a red+amber light can be on for, or an amber light, as these are ultimately warnings, alerting you to an imminent change in traffic flow, so cannot be indefinite. The only workaround that would be legal would be to have everything OFF. If everything was green I would fear there would be some fault liable to the council or the traffic light maintainers in the event of an accident with everything stating "clear to go".
While not directly related I am in the business of computers and system maintenance, installation, etc. And as part of our agreements with have response times and resolution time SLAs which we must comply with or we are hit with large fees. For example if we have a network component go down with some clients we have a guaranteed 4 hour FIX.
For example today we had a failed power supply unit on a customers core telephone unit. I'm not sure exactly what level of service this client receives (as I am away in the North on a pre-booked job so not really paying attention to the daily musings of the general support desk) but they had a replacement part taken to site by an engineer, replaced and now things were working.
Sometimes we have times were something has failed, and it's an old part, that we cannot get spares for, and we have to manage, we come up with solutions to the problems or a suitable workaround where we can. It's very rare we'll just say "Tough titties, you're on your own". Because it doesn't help your customer, it doesn't help you as a company (makes you look like tosspots) and doesn't help the end users effect (in this case us as road users).
I do not understand the technicalities of how traffic lights are managed as I don't really care. But it would seem to be with my thinking cap on - to be nothing more than basic logical circuits, loopback wires in the road with simple logic switches.. <IF loop a = active, traffic lights group 1 sequence start..> (where the sequence is perhaps allowing them to be green for 30 seconds or until X amount of loopbacks on the adjacent circuit is triggered, eg a larger queue of traffic).
I would not imagine they are massively complicated and so to be told that control units, etc are unobtainable, old, whatever, then that to me would be unacceptable.
Likewise with the traffic lights, if not able to be configured/set up/reset from a remote location over either regular internet connection or perhaps more likely an ISDN line) that they would have engineers dotted around the country with a REASONABLE distance. Newbury is hardly in the middle of nowhere, it's an hour by train from London, likewise it's an hour from Bristol, an Hour from Southampton... I would have expected teams to have been working on (or even just turned them off) within the hour to be honest.
And worse still I think, the show from Thames Valley Police who were seeminngly unwilling to help out... at that time in the morning... coffee and doughnuts...