It's actually a fascinating problem. Naively, it seems you can't sync traffic in both directions of a 2-way street at the same time -- e.g. eastbound and westbound.
Two things I've thought of that would work for both directions:
1) if it's a square grid, you could pick some streets that are optimized westbound, and some eastbound, for example. And then carefully arrange those so the north-south streets also mesh with it.
2) if you can space the lights the right distance apart, you could create a "standing wave" where it is actually optimized both ways. But you'd have to space them farther apart and more regularly than in real cities. For example, you could set lights apart by 1 minute travel time at 30mph, if the signal cycle is 1 minute.
I'm curious what other solutions are to this, and how they do it in a place like LA in practice!
Two things I've thought of that would work for both directions:
1) if it's a square grid, you could pick some streets that are optimized westbound, and some eastbound, for example. And then carefully arrange those so the north-south streets also mesh with it.
2) if you can space the lights the right distance apart, you could create a "standing wave" where it is actually optimized both ways. But you'd have to space them farther apart and more regularly than in real cities. For example, you could set lights apart by 1 minute travel time at 30mph, if the signal cycle is 1 minute.
I'm curious what other solutions are to this, and how they do it in a place like LA in practice!