HOUSTON -- Everyone knows what’s wrong with traffic lights – they make you stop.

“It seems like two minutes too long,” driver Angela Harris said.

And then they make you wait.

“It seems like I’m waiting 10 minutes just to get through these three lights,” Margaret Montaldo said.

All that stopping and starting doesn’t just waste time, it wastes gas.  Nearly a quarter of every gallon you buy is used for slowing down, stopping and then speeding up again.

But some revolutionary technology being deployed at Houston Transtar may help change that.

“It’s very phenomenal. It’s one of the most efficient things you can do from a signal perspective,” Transtar’s Wayne Gisler said.

Gisler is testing something called the ACS Lite.  It goes far beyond manual timing of traffic lights.

Here’s how it works: a computer is linked to a series of lights, and it constantly gets readings from underground censors that optimize the signals down an entire street.

If it knows ten cars are half a mile away, it will turn the lights green just in time and go red again as soon as everyone has moved through.

11 News photo

“This thing will communicate with the intersection that’s way down the street and knows that the wave of traffic is coming towards it,” Gisler said.

Six of the connected signals are currently being tested on Memorial Drive.

11 News went to see them in action during rush hour, and – sure enough – cars moved through every intersection, never hitting a light.

The system adapts to the exact traffic patterns.

“You’re never going to have a light turn green exactly when you want it, but what we’re trying to do is minimize the amount of time that anyone has to wait,” Gisler said.

Before the computers showed up, it took about 15 minutes to drive down that particular stretch of Memorial during rush hour.

Now that the lights are communicating, it takes less than five.

The system has also been controlling eight intersections along Highway 6 for two years now.

When Transtar handed those signals over to the computer, travel time dropped by 11 percent.

Drivers used 7 percent less gas, because they didn’t hit as many lights.

And that means commuters who drove through there every day saved $227 a year in fuel costs.

What’s more, the system doesn’t cost much for Transtar to install.

“It doesn’t. It costs in the thousands. You basically have to replace electrical equipment. All the infrastructure is here, all the detection equipment is here, it’s literally just replacing computers,” Gisler said.

Harris County currently has plans to add the technology to hundreds more intersections as part of a $30 million traffic upgrade. 

It’s cheap, it’s easy, and – best of all – it’s not rocket science.