How Canberra's traffic management centre keeps the city moving - and why they're more important than ever

With vast stretches of London Circuit to be closed until late 2026 due to construction of Light Rail Stage 2A in the area, Roads ACT executive branch manager Tim Rampton admits it will be tempting for motorists to duck through the Civic bus interchange.

Resisting this urge is the message because chances are his team at the ACT’s Traffic Management Centre will see it.

Five years ago, this consisted of one computer screen. Nowadays, it’s an entire room in a building in Fyshwick, lined with a bank of TV screens.

Each of them is fed with live footage from about 130 cameras spread across the Territory’s major roads, while another screen, depicting a map of the ACT, changes the colours of the roads depending on the level of congestion (similar to what your Google Maps app does).

This is fed by about 200 so-called ‘Bluetooth sniffers’ which pick up the Bluetooth signals emitted by mobile devices in passing cars to get an accurate, real-time traffic count. But don’t worry – Mr Rampton’s team can’t hear you listening to Tay Tay, again.

“Nothing is recorded,” he says.

“It’s purely for traffic-regulation purposes.”

The information here is relayed to the variable-message boards you’ll see parked alongside several of the ACT’s roads, which say things like “15 minutes to the city”, and it’s also sent to Transport Canberra for their bus drivers.

Traffic lights, normally powered automatically by sensors in the tarmac or complex timing systems, can also be individually changed with some clicks of a mouse.

“When visiting dignitaries or VIPs come to town, we … can assist the AFP by giving them green lights wherever they need to go, which is a great initiative because it means there’s less police required on the ground,” Mr Rampton adds.

Too much traffic building up at an intersection?

“If we, say, have an accident on the network … we can manually adjust and give one side more green to try and flush them through and get them out of the area.”

Mr Rampton brings all this up because over the next two years, his team will be paying extra careful attention to what’s happening on the roads around Civic as light rail begins its slow march up to Commonwealth Park.

One of the three lanes on each side of Northbourne Avenue will be closed near the London Circuit intersection (in the 40 km/h zone) until at least late 2026.

London Circuit itself will be closed to all but buses, delivery trucks and pedestrians, while the colloquially dubbed “Mooseheads car park” near the Canberra Theatre Centre will lose two rows of parking spaces to construction vehicles.

“We saw it last month as a result of the London Circuit west closure. It took a few weeks for people to work it out and start to find other routes into and out of the city, so we’re expecting a similar thing here,” he says.

“We’ll be watching closely to see what happens. We’re particularly watching to make sure we don’t get general traffic coming through the bus interchange. That’s something that’s obviously dangerous.”

While the project is meant to last until late 2026, Mr Rampton says there’ll likely be “tweaks” to the closures along the way.

“We have a coordination meeting each day with the project team, with comms, with bus operations, just to talk about what we see each day. And then most days, we make changes – you know, minor little tweaks to try and improve things. It’s quite dynamic.”

Teams have also been deployed to the site specifically to help guide pedestrians around the construction too.

“That’ll continue over the next few days.”

As for businesses in the area, Mr Rampton assures the government has been “working closely” with them to minimise disruption.

“We understand there are some concerns and angst from the businesses in the area, and that’s understandable, but we’re working as closely as we can with them to try to alleviate those issues.”

Visit Built for CBR for more information on the road closures.