By . Ap . PUBLISHED: . 18:06 EST, 26 May 2013 . | . UPDATED: . 18:16 EST, 26 May 2013 . It seems that the impossible has occurred: The nation's most congested city has become a model for traffic control. Yes, . gridlock still prevails and drivers' blood pressure still spikes as . LA's traffic arteries seize up during every morning and afternoon rush . hour. Yet, with the flip of a switch earlier . this year, Los Angeles became a worldwide leader by synchronizing all of . its nearly 4,400 stoplights, making it the world's first major city to . do so. Synched up: all of Los Angeles' 4,400 stop lights are now synched up . The result? Well, it can still be hell . to cross the City of the Angels by car. Synchronization has allowed LA . to boast of real improvements on paper, however, the average driver . won't always be able to discern the difference of a project that took . nearly 30 years to complete. "To be honest . with you, I haven't felt it, yet," said Jack Abramyam, who has been . driving a cab across LA's mean streets for 20 years. "Late . at night, maybe, yes," Abramyam said as he sat outside his cab on a . street in Chinatown recently, waiting for a fare. "But it was never . really bad then anyway. During the day it was bad. And it's still bad." The . way synchronization works is simple enough: With all the signals . synchronized, if you drive down a street at the posted speed limit you . should be able to make every green light - from one end of this . sprawling city of 469 square miles to the other. Of course there are any number of obstacles that can prevent that. Congestion: transportation engineer associate Abeer Kliefe works at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation's Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control Center . On . a recent mid-afternoon test drive down eight miles of Wilshire . Boulevard, for example, I was cut off by a bus, stuck behind more than . one right-turner waiting for pedestrians to cross the intersecting . street and at one point had my lane blocked by a delivery truck. Approaching . the world famous La Brea Tar Pits - where prehistoric dinosaurs once . got stuck in muck, not traffic - so many people were waiting to turn . left into a parking lot that the street became gridlocked for more than . two blocks. The numerous synchronized green lights didn't wait for me. But why would they? With the posted speed limit 35 mph, I was only . averaging 15. Still, once the LA County Museum . of Art, the high-rise apartments, the headquarters of porn publisher . Larry Flynt and the various other Wilshire Boulevard landmarks were in . the rear-view mirror, the pace did pick up. So much so that 11 green . lights in a row suddenly materialized. That string ended on the edge of . downtown, however, when Wilshire simply became clogged with too many . cars. It was a non-rush hour jam that demonstrated that, good as . synchronization may be, it isn't a magic, traffic-breaking bullet. Los Angeles Department of Transportation officials agree. City of angels - and gridlock: Los Angeles freeways are amongst the most congested in the world . As . they stated in a recent report praising the benefits of synchronized . signals, "No traffic signal system is capable of `fixing traffic.'" If . more motor vehicles show up in the years ahead (and there are already . more than 7.1 million of them registered in Los Angeles County, a number . greater than that of most states), then officials say LA traffic jams . will probably get worse. That's why, said . Clinton Quan, an engineering associate with the Department of . Transportation, planners are continuing to push people to ride bicycles, . take commuter rail lines and other public transportation and move close . enough to work that they can walk there. The . city has added three light rail lines in the last seven years and has . more planned. Officials also recently approved plans to allow high-rise . apartment and condominium buildings along a corridor in Hollywood where a . subway connecting the city's West Side to downtown is supposed to go. In . the meantime, Quan says, the synchronized signal program is putting up . some pretty impressive numbers, even if the average driver isn't . noticing them. It has reduced the drive time on several major LA . corridors, for example, by about 12 percent. In driver-speak, that means the trip across town that used to take you an hour has been reduced to about 53 minutes. And . that's nothing to shrug at, says Robert Puentes, a senior fellow with . the Brookings Institution's metropolitan policy program, which studies . among other things the impact of traffic on the quality of life in . metropolitan areas. Several other . traffic-clogged cities are looking into instituting similar programs and . New York already synchronizes some of its stoplights, said Puentes, who . works in Washington, D.C., the ninth-worst traffic-clogged city in the . country. "If you can get a 12 percent reduction on, say, the Washington Beltway, that would be phenomenal," he said.
Los Angeles became a worldwide leader by synchronizing all of . its nearly 4,400 stoplights, making it the world's first major city to . do so. With all the signals . synchronized, if you drive down a street at the posted speed limit you . should be able to make every green light - from one end of this . sprawling city of 469 square miles to the other. The project took an astonishing 30 years to complete .