I’ve had several emails about problems with phasing of traffic lights by Tesco’s. The current problems with the timings of the TESCO traffic lights are due to 2 faults:
- A detector fault, Surrey County Council is waiting for contractors to investigate today or tomorrow. This may explain the signals “favouring” the side roads.
- The MOVA unit at the lights is not working. A new unit has been ordered and may take 2 weeks to be installed. The MOVA unit varies the green time according to traffic flow. It does not really have set timings as such apart from the inter-green times (safety time period between conflicting greens) and the Green Man times. MOVA monitors traffic and pedestrian demand on each approach and apportions the green time around the junction to allow traffic and pedestrians to pass through the junction as efficiently as possible. It detects gaps in the approaching traffic and will trigger the signals to change just as the last vehicle crosses the Stop Line. However, if any of the detectors are faulty the signals will keep giving priority to the affected approach.
UPDATE on 6th April 2017 regarding repair:
Repairs have been carried out on the faulty TESCO lights- The MOVA unit was installed last week and Surrey County Council (SCC) attended yesterday (5th April) and uploaded the dataset, enabling MOVA. The faulty detector was repaired on Friday (31at March).
It does seem to be running pretty well so far, but I’d be grateful for any resident feedback following the repairs for me to pass on to SCC highways.