Navigating Los Angeles by car is a notoriously soul-crushing endeavor, particularly when you find yourself trapped in the kind of infrastructural purgatory locals affectionately call the “Devil’s three-way”—the chaotic, multi-signal convergence of Fairfax, Olympic, and San Vicente. For 99% Invisible’s Vivian Le, sitting squarely in the passenger seat while her husband Cody Franklin white-knuckles it through the gridlock, the frustration is palpable. It is exactly this kind of mundane, maddening urban experience that host Delaney Hall sets out to decode in Service Request, a collaborative series from 99% Invisible and Campside Media that pulls back the curtain on the hidden municipal networks keeping our cities running.
At the heart of the daily Los Angeles commute is a sprawling, centralized nervous system known as ATSAC, or the Advanced Transportation System and Coordination. The network links nearly 5,000 traffic signals across the city to a downtown control room. Seleta Reynolds, the Chief Innovation Officer at LA Metro who ran the agency for a decade, notes that the system operates like a massive civic brain. Sensors embedded directly into the pavement detect waiting vehicles and feed that data into algorithms that constantly calculate the delicate balance of space and time, orchestrating the flow of millions of commuters.
While the system relies heavily on automated math to dictate the rhythm of the streets, it still requires a human touch. In that downtown control center—a room so inherently cinematic it was famously hacked to create artificial gridlock in the 2003 heist film The Italian Job—engineers monitor hundreds of live camera feeds. When algorithms fail or extraordinary events like protests and sinkholes snarl the streets, these operators can manually override the signals, pushing green lights to clear out congested corridors.
What infrastructure mystery keeps you up at night? Submit your Service Request by recording a voice memo with your question and emailing it to [email protected].
This high-tech approach to traffic management was actually born out of sheer civic desperation. In the lead-up to the 1984 Olympic Games, officials were terrified that millions of visiting spectators would push the city’s already strained roadways into total paralysis. Back then, fixing a jammed intersection meant deploying an engineer in a car to physically reprogram a local signal box. Faced with impending disaster, traffic engineer Ed Rowe spearheaded a moonshot initiative from a local garage, utilizing underground fiber-optic cables to remotely network 115 intersections around the LA Coliseum. The experiment was a massive success, preventing Olympic gridlock and establishing a technological blueprint that would eventually be studied and replicated by future host cities from Sydney to Beijing.
Over the ensuing decades, ATSAC expanded to cover the entire metropolis, but its core philosophy also underwent a dramatic shift. Under leaders like Reynolds, the department recognized that transportation engineering is less about pure mathematics and more about behavioral psychology. The metric for success evolved from simply minimizing car delays to prioritizing the collective good of the public right-of-way. The system was recalibrated to favor highly efficient modes of transit like buses and trains, and to actively protect pedestrians and cyclists. In some dangerous corridors, engineers even programmed signals to rest on flashing yellows or reds late at night, a subtle psychological design tweak meant to force speeding drivers to slow their roll.
As Los Angeles gears up to host the Olympics once again in 2028, the city is preparing to roll out the next iteration of ATSAC to manage an entirely new generation of transit challenges. But whether you are an international athlete, a daily commuter, or a frustrated passenger princess stuck at a red light, your wait is never truly arbitrary. You are simply one variable in an incredibly complex, constantly shifting utilitarian equation designed to keep the built environment moving.
What infrastructure mystery keeps you up at night? Submit your Service Request by recording a voice memo with your question and emailing it to [email protected].
Service Request is a production of 99% Invisible and Campside Media.
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