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descriptive
Transport for Greater Manchester's Urban Traffic Control team runs the traffic signals of all ten Greater Manchester councils, Manchester included
Permanent project revision
Revision 2026-10-16-baseline · effective 2026-10-16
Current revision. This is the snapshot used by the live entity page.
Created the first structured Evidence Passport with 26 claims and 13 source dossiers.
sha256:8a36399e4f2ccaa3d1f5e1dec2041b1db0ea4bb79ac005f27f4add6d6ecaad57
add /evidencePassport — Added claim-level evidence mapping and source dossiers.add /revisionHistory — Established a permanent, hash-addressed baseline revision.The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-433aa3f420045c69
descriptive
Transport for Greater Manchester's Urban Traffic Control team runs the traffic signals of all ten Greater Manchester councils, Manchester included
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more than 2,400 installations, 985 of them pedestrian crossings
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operated from TfGM's Control Centre
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operating around the clock since April 2018
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Adaptive control comes from SCOOT, which coordinates groups of signals from vehicle detectors, and MOVA at single junctions
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in November 2019 TfGM put 47% of signalised junctions under such smart control
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against a 2018 target of 70%
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Both detect vehicles, not people on foot or bike.
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From 2020 a trial let a Vivacity Labs AI agent, fed by video sensors, run signals
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in Salford and on the Manchester–Salford border
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Vivacity's sensors also count road users for TfGM across the region: counting, not control.
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In a four-week 2019 pilot on the A6 Stockport Road, SCOOT gave late-running 192 buses extra green at 14 sets of signals between Stockport and Manchester
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11.8% of the priority messages the signals received led to green time for a late bus, with an average saving of 31 seconds per junction, by TfGM's count
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TfGM later told its transport committee the A6 scheme had run at 26 junctions
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"without any adverse impact to general traffic"
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planned to extend it to A635 Ashton Old Road and A5103 Princess Road
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Vivacity reports a 23% cut in journey time across a single junction "in Manchester" under its AI control
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In TfGM's 2023 pilot with Google's Green Light, recommended timing changes at one junction brought an average improvement of 9% in the morning peak and 18% in the afternoon peak
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many recommendations were not applied, because the signals were giving priority to buses and pedestrians or discouraging rat-running
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None of these figures comes from an independent evaluation, and neither the supplier nor the Green Light report names the junction; the Green Light report does not name the measure either.
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Central adaptive control is a mature instrument with a built-in bias.
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TfGM's own engineer wrote in 2021 that SCOOT and MOVA cannot bring pedestrians and cyclists into their algorithms
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and that political appetite had kept signal control vehicle-first
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The region's answer was to add video sensors and trial an AI agent, promising an evaluation that would weigh pedestrians, cycles, buses and cars rather than car traffic alone.
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The figures in circulation are the supplier's and the operator's.
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the system already in place can be told whose delay counts
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src-2e512fbc0ccc263cTfGM's standing page on its Urban Traffic Control (UTC) team: a signal control service to the ten district councils of Greater Manchester and Highways England; more than 2,400 installations, which TfGM calls the largest number in the UK outside London, operated and controlled through TfGM's Control Centre with SCOOT and MOVA; 985 of the 2,400 sets of signals are pedestrian crossings; UTC also maintains variable message signs, car park signs and automatic traffic count sites.
src-de07665e5ad798b2Report by TfGM's chief operating officer on the Congestion Deal launched in March 2018: the Control Centre moved to 24/7 operation in April 2018 and alters signal timings to improve vehicle flows; a SCOOT bus-priority pilot ran at 26 junctions on the A6 Hazel Grove to Manchester corridor, giving extra green to late buses where spare capacity was detected 'without any adverse impact to general traffic', with roll-out planned to A635 Ashton Old Road and A5103 Princess Road; over 2,400 signalised junctions, 47% under smart (adaptive) control, with 97 more junctions in an installation programme, 46 of them commissioned.
src-f609f96b5681a822Reports £5.6m of Growth Deal funding for SCOOT, which coordinates groups of signals from sensor data, and MOVA at standalone junctions, both 'due to be rolled out across 70% of Greater Manchester's signal-controlled junctions'; TfGM says SCOOT has been shown to increase traffic performance by up to 15% compared with fixed-time lights.
src-e2d4c2ab89bf49dcReports a four-week TfGM pilot on the A6 Stockport Road in which SCOOT extended green time for late-running 192 buses at 14 sets of traffic lights between Stockport and Manchester, based on each bus's lateness; 11.8% of messages received by the signals resulted in priority, with an average saving of 31 seconds per junction (8.2% and 12.9% in the weekday morning and evening peaks, 11.5% at weekends).
src-366e09cc1ab73441Reports that Vivacity Labs' AI signal control went live early in 2020 and in September 2020 began simultaneously controlling three neighbouring junctions in the Blackfriars area of Salford; part of a three-year Innovate UK co-funded programme, with further money from DCMS's 5G Create fund; the project 'will scale up to an area of 20 junctions in Manchester by the end of 2021'.
src-b52e656856346df3Comment by TfGM's ITS engineer: TfGM operates over 1,250 adaptive signal control systems (1,000 SCOOT sites and 250 MOVA sites); SCOOT feeds vehicle detection from multiple junctions into a central model, MOVA controls one junction at a time; their weakness is the inability to incorporate pedestrians and cyclists; political appetite kept signal control vehicle-first; the Smart Junctions project installed over 100 AI sensors across over 13 junctions and two crossings in Salford and Manchester city centre and let a reinforcement-learning agent from Vivacity take control of signal timings; evaluation was to consider pedestrians, cycles, buses and cars rather than car traffic only.
src-1c165dcaefe51299Interview with TfGM's ITS engineer on the three-year Smart Junctions project with Vivacity Labs: around 200 sensors give insight into pedestrian movements; the AI control is compared directly with SCOOT and MOVA in one of Greater Manchester's larger SCOOT regions; TfGM operates over 750 junctions on SCOOT and over 250 on MOVA; the Covid-19 pandemic curtailed some comparison opportunities.
src-5a567169f7fcf845Supplier's account of the Innovate UK co-funded project with TfGM and Immense Simulations: after controlling three neighbouring junctions, the system was scaled to control five junctions along 'a whole key corridor on the main orbital route on the Manchester Salford border'; claims real-world trials reduced journey times through a junction by an average of 23%.
src-8e057b05d607d51dSupplier's news post: 'in Manchester Smart Junctions achieved a 23% reduction in journey time across a single junction', illustrated with a before/with chart; the junction is not named.
src-571ce225c4a41f20Supplier's customer page for TfGM: TfGM awarded Vivacity a three-year call-off contract for traffic monitoring across the region, available to local authority partners; the technology 'was also deployed to control traffic signals in Salford'; 200+ sensors rolled out since 2022 for active travel, Smart Junctions, network monitoring and school streets.
src-657417315f57b702Reports TfGM's Green Light pilot with Google: Google reviewed traffic movements and recommended signal timing changes; because signals often give priority to buses or pedestrians or discourage rat-running, recommendations did not always lead to changes; where they did, changes at one junction gave an average improvement of 9% in the morning peak and 18% in the afternoon peak; quotes TfGM's analysis and reporting manager on a network of 2,400 traffic signals.
src-784cc4c59e10f49aTrade report that TRL Software will supply its UTC SCOOT 7 software, with pedestrian-priority functions, in a programme of works with TfGM; quotes TRL that TfGM has used its UTC since 2019; reports that Manchester City Council was awarded £500,000 by the DfT from the Traffic Signals Maintenance funding call to help deploy cloud-hosted UTC SCOOT until 2024.
src-f110824400941082Allocation table for the £30m Traffic Signal Obsolescence Grant and £20m Green Light Fund: Greater Manchester Combined Authority (TfGM) receives £5,626,838.37 in total, of which £5,000,000 from the competitive element.