Invisible hand helps drivers deal with traffic — sometimes
Many areas still lack devices to detect slowdowns, adjust signals’ timing
A variety of new technologies are supposed to reduce the time South Florida drivers are stuck in traffic. But the devices haven’t been installed yet in many trafficpacked areas, including vast stretches of western and northern Broward County.
Broward, Palm Beach and MiamiDade counties — and the city of Boca Raton — all are turning to behind-thescenes tools to monitor traffic and improve the timing of traffic signals.
The tools include cameras at intersections to watch for congestion. Sensors also detect the volume and speed of traffic and can alert a traffic center when slowdowns occur. Other sensors latch onto car computer or passenger cellphone signals to determine how long it’s taking vehicles to travel various sections of roadway.
None of these advances, however, will prevent gridlock at rush hour, when traffic simply overwhelms any system. And the technology has not even been installed in virtually all of the communities and roadways west of University Drive and north of Oakland Park Boulevard in Broward County.
“How do you do active management of the Broward County roadways and stop at Oakland Park Boulevard and nothing more to the north?” County Commissioner Michael Udine asked. “It’s a huge part of the county.”
Commissioner Nan Rich, who repre-
sents some western portions of the county, was perplexed as well.
“Do people live west of University Drive?” Rich asked facetiously. “We all drive in horrendous traffic every day.”
Traffic managers explained that the Florida Department of Transportation installed the systems along 70 miles of state roads in the county, and there are no state roads west of University Drive.
The system will need to be expanded by the county, coordinating with the state, they said.
Udine said the county should make expansion a priority. At a cost of about $300,000 for each mile of roadway added to the system, it is a bargain compared with the cost of building additional travel lanes — if there’s even room to put those lanes, he said.
Stepping into the future
Traffic managers say the goal of the new systems is to collect as much traffic data as they can and figure out how they can use it to determine where road problems are likely to happen, much like Amazon and Google mine the data they receive to develop reliable consumer profiles.
“They’re watching what you’re doing and predicting what you’ll do,” Mark Plass, district operations engineer for the state transportation department, said of the online companies.
Traffic managers have to be able to predict, too, so that instead of trying to put out fires quickly they get “really good at not having a fire in the first place,” he said.
These “active” traffic management systems, where officials step in to control red and green lights, started in Palm Beach County in 2013 and in Broward last year, in coordination with the state transportation department. Broward has 177 cameras watching traffic on its streets and Palm Beach 159. However, while all of Broward’s were put up by the state along state roads, Palm Beach County put up more than half of its cameras on its own on roads throughout the county.
Officials say the Palm Beach County operation is averaging about 110 signal timing changes a month using the data coming into its center, while the newer Broward program is averaging about 47 signal timing changes a month.
The systems also include more expensive, “smart” technologies that require even less manual intervention. As sensors detect slowdowns, these systems can automatically make adjustments to signal timing. The automated system locations include:
Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach east of Interstate 95, where two sets of north-south railroad lines run close to each other near the heart of downtown.
Sections of Glades Road and Military Trail in Boca Raton near the Florida Atlantic University campus, paid for by the university as part of its agreement for its football stadium on campus, with another section planned on Spanish River Boulevard on the north side of FAU.
A section now planned on Pines Boulevard in Pembroke Pines between Dykes and Flamingo roads near Interstate 75, where there are a number of medical centers and emergency vehicles frequently override the synchronized traffic lights in the area.
Not a perfect solution
Officials acknowledge the devices aren’t a great help when traffic is at its heaviest, but they see them as a way of slowing down the deterioration of an already bad situation and minimizing traffic tie-ups at other times of the day.
“If you weren’t doing this, imagine how much worse it would be,” Plass said. His state transportation district oversees work in Broward and Palm Beach counties.
In Broward next year, state transportation officials plan to deploy Road Rangers now common on the interstates to some state roads including University Drive, Sunrise Boulevard, State Road 7 and Griffin Road. The hope is that the Road Rangers will be able to more quickly clear accidents or disabled vehicles.
There are new challenges coming, too.
Once the Brightline passenger train service starts, an additional 32 trains a day will run on the tracks near Federal Highway. An individual train might block an intersection for less than a minute — about the time of a short red light — but that’s more than enough time to throw off the timing of traffic lights on each east-west road a train crosses up and down the coast.
That signal timing usually can take seven to 15 minutes to return to normal, irritating drivers. Officials hope the new technology can reduce those times.
In using the new data streams, transportation managers have more people to think about than just drivers. There is also an increasing emphasis on pedestrians and bicyclists and how to accommodate them better.
While drivers might like to see all green lights ahead, that nonstop traffic could keep pedestrians from being able to cross the road at intersections that don’t have traffic lights. Making drivers stop more frequently during heavy pedestrian periods gives those walkers more opportunities to cross.
In Weston, where cycling is popular, officials are looking at sensors to identify when there’s heavy bicycle activity. That might lead traffic managers to time the green lights to the speed of the cyclists during certain portions of the day, to make their commutes more convenient, instead of always giving the priority to car traffic.
The ultimate goal is to give drivers consistent travel times they can rely on day to day, not necessarily to shorten the time of their trips significantly.
“There’s only so much green time we can give to anything,” said Melissa Ackert, a state transportation engineer.