NYC Commuters Will Soon Be Getting Microwaved

Getting caught in traffic sucks for everyone. So New York City Mayor Bloomberg and his crack team of engineers are working on a way to both monitor traffic and get you moving, involving more cameras and a lot of microwaves.

The new initiative is called “Midtown in Motion” and will cover 42nd to 57th Street between 2nd and 6th Avenues. The system will implement traffic cameras, microwave sensors and E-ZPass readers to monitor traffic flow and congestion. With that information on hand, traffic engineers could manipulate green lights to move backed up commuters onto their destinations faster.

It all sounds like that scene from the Italian Job, when they hacked into the Turin traffic system. The engineers seem fairly optimistic about the plan, and hope to see it implemented city-wide by 2013. Good, because Lower Manhattan could use some help, too. [CBS New York]

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