Smart Medians or Dividers for a Smart City?

Medians or Dividers on the road serve as an excellent tool for enforcing lane discipline and probably as a good regulator for managing the traffic. However at times, it may be a cause for an increase in traffic jams, especially on one side of the median. 

I had earlier proposed the idea of Shiftable medians (in 2011) - a sort of Dynamic Medians on the road instead of the fixed ones. The advantages are given below:

• During Peak hours, traffic is generally expected to flow in one direction. At such times, when the roads are narrow, the median will be a bigger hindrance, and in such instances, if more lanes (say 3) are allowed for the peak traffic to flow instead of existing (say 2) lanes, it will ease the flow of traffic
• For emergency vehicles, such as Ambulance, a separate lane can be facilitated, if the median can be shifted to one corner of the road 
• A median can be removed during holidays or off-hours to simply allow crowds or gatherings to pass through - on a positive note think of a Marathon or Walkathon 
• A median can be made leaner or fatter based on the need, though such a use case scenario would then be exploited for advertisement hoardings

Given that Smart City initiatives are under progress in several countries including India, it makes sense to have Shift-able medians or smart medians as it has the advantages outlined above. 

Taking it a step further, the smart medians of course would require management, which could be initially done by humans, but later managed through intelligent systems that takes several inputs including the traffic conditions, timing, traffic flow at traffic signals etc... 

Update: September 2015: Found Shiftable median concept being already used in SanFanscico Golden Gate, in January 2015, called as Moveable Median, as given below, wherein a Zipper truck is being used for shifting the median.