Prague Moves to Bring Every Traffic Light Under One Owner

Who owns a traffic light in Prague is a more complicated question than it looks. Most of the signals at the city's junctions belong to the city, but some were built by private investors and stayed in their hands. Servicing is split three ways: part by TSK, the city's roads authority, through its subsidiary TSK servisní; part by the city company Technologie hlavního města Prahy (THMP); and part by other contractors. TSK has now started to pull that together, Zdopravy.cz reported on 19 October.

What has changed, and what is next

Since 1 October TSK has run a single dispatch centre for the management of the city's traffic signals. It is also the main contact point for reporting faults — a damaged head, a dark signal, a pedestrian button that does nothing — on a non-stop line, 257 015 015.

That is described as the first step. From 1 February TSK takes over field servicing and maintenance of the signals from THMP.

The third step concerns ownership. For private signals where the city already provides full servicing, TSK says work is under way on transferring them gradually into the city's ownership. Zdopravy.cz's headline speaks of Prague wanting to buy them out; the article itself describes a transfer and gives no terms, prices or numbers of signals.

"Our goal is a simple state of affairs: traffic signals should, wherever possible, be the property of the city, TSK should manage and develop them, and we want basic servicing unified under one management. Today the system is split between several owners and several service providers. So we are gradually putting the individual parts together, so that we can be clearly accountable for the whole system."

— Martin Pípa, TSK board member responsible for telematics

From maintenance to design

The longer ambition goes beyond maintenance. TSK wants in future to design signals and plan their adaptation and modernisation itself, as it did this year around Kbelská while that road was being repaired.

"We don't want to be just an administrator who orders the repair of a broken signal. We need to understand the whole system — to be able to propose a change, design it, build it, operate it and then evaluate how the equipment works."

— Filip Hájek, director general of TSK

Why it matters

Traffic signals are where most of the city's street-level transport policy is actually carried out. Priority for trams and buses, the length of a pedestrian green, whether a junction is tuned for throughput or for crossing on foot: all of it ends up as timing in a controller box. A system in which the box at one junction belongs to the city, the one at the next to a private investor, and the servicing to whichever of three firms holds that contract, is one where nobody can easily answer for the result. That is, in effect, what Pípa says.

The reform is administrative, and its effect will not be visible at any single junction on 1 February. But it settles a question that has to be settled before any city-wide change to how signals behave can be made: whose they are, and who answers when one goes dark.