A new generation of traffic signal technology is coming to Clark County. It packs information-age sophistication that promises ease of maintenance, constant situational monitoring and real-time response. That means less time pointlessly spent listening to your motor idle and your time on this planet run down.
How much time? County traffic engineering manager Bill Wright did a little back-of-the-envelope figuring and came up with something like 4.4 hours per month — more than two days per year or nearly six months out of a typical 75-year modern American life — spent growing gray hairs while you’re waiting for the light to change.
In the past few weeks, The Columbian’s “What’s Up With That?” column received several queries from folks frustrated that local traffic signals seem to be backsliding. From the entrance to the Salmon Creek Fred Meyer at Tenney Road to the stretch of Northeast 136th Avenue in front of the Firstenburg Community Center, motorists report sitting stuck on side streets or in through lanes while formerly “smart” lights that used to sense their approach and adapt accordingly now sleepwalk through a preset cycle of signals.
“It doesn’t matter if no cars are waiting to turn left,” said Jim Chiappetta. “The arrow turns green for the phantom cars and traffic going straight sits there.”
“Many mornings, I am the only vehicle at the intersection at 5 a.m.,” said Ed LaLonde. “I watch as the traffic signal proceeds through its sequence, signaling green where there are no vehicles … while I sit and wait, sometimes up to four minutes.”
Their annoyance is shared by Clark County traffic engineer Rob Klug, 41, who lives with his family near Salmon Creek Elementary School and often sits at the unresponsive Fred Meyer light.
“I am one of those people,” said Klug. “I want to fix this. I’m frustrated, too.”
The good news is that the signals that seem to have lost some smarts are actually in mid-fix. The city of Vancouver will soon install the same video-detection technology on Northeast 136th Avenue that has smoothed out the formerly gridlocked East Mill Plain and East Fourth Plain boulevards.
And Clark County has embarked upon a sweeping upgrade of the signal system along the entirety of one of its busiest and most complex corridors: Salmon Creek Avenue-Bliss Road-Hathaway Road-134th-139th streets. That succession of names should tip you off: It’s a long stretch of asphalt that passes by subdivisions, schools, ball fields, industrial buildings, one big-box store, a tangle of freeway ramps and local-road connections, a jumble of strip malls and fast food joints, a couple of motels, a commuter parking lot and a university campus.
Stimulus money
It’s 3.4 miles long and has 17 signals. Upgrading them all will cost an estimated $1.3 million, with $900,000 coming from a federal economic stimulus grant.
“The county and the region have been fortunate in receiving federal grants to get many shared corridors done,” Wright said. Once the Salmon Creek corridor is done, Wright said, the county will upgrade the nine-signal Padden Parkway/Andresen Road intersection area (in partnership with Vancouver and Washington state, and mostly paid for by $600,000 in federal dollars) and then the five-signal Northeast 99th Street corridor between Hazel Dell Avenue and 25th Avenue (largely covered with another $600,000 from Uncle Sam).
“Our goal would be to continue upgrading corridors as we continue to receive federal grants,” said Wright. “Over the next two years we hope to be 50 to 60 percent done with all the signals in the unincorporated county.”
In the beginning, traffic signals were individual stop-go beacons — isolated islands in the stream. They worked according to preset cycles. If you had to wait, you had to wait.
More recently, the signals acquired some sensitivity. Take a look at the asphalt just before traffic signals, and you’ll notice big circles buried in each lane. Those circles are called loop detectors, and they sense cars that are driving by — or sitting still. They tell traffic signals to hurry up and change when there’s a need in one direction and no need in another. Without that input, the signals go back to sleepwalking through the standard cycle.
That’s what drivers have found annoying in front of Fred Meyer and the Firstenburg Center: Loop detectors that got disconnected — or just plain broken — when road work was underway.
“We used to put loops everywhere,” said Klug. “But in the last year, we’ve had a number of intersection conundrums in the county.”
Copper wires buried in shallow pavement, constantly carrying tons of rumbling traffic and subject to the vagaries of heat and cold, sun and rain, tend to fail. Fixing them means calling in contractors and cutting asphalt — costing big bucks and disrupting the flow of traffic. Plus, there’s the wait time. Despite all the recent growth in the Portland area — all those new roads, all those new drivers — Klug said there’s only one working loop-detector installer in the entire region.
“It’s challenging to get a loop installer in,” he said. “They’re working all around the area in all kinds of weather, with all kinds of schedules and different contractors. It has not been abnormal to have a brand new signal but to wait weeks or months to get the loops in.”
Next, in the late 1990s, the county tried video-detection cameras at several intersections. But they didn’t work as well as they should have, Klug said, and getting parts to repair and replace them wasn’t easy.
Better data, decisions
Which brings us to today. Armed with federal stimulus money as well as its first-ever dedicated maintenance budget aimed at upgrading traffic signal equipment, Clark County has already taken several opportunities — when road work was already scheduled — to start installing a new triple-technology traffic light system: video cameras, old-fashioned loops, and radar.
Video detection slices intersections into zones — turn lanes, through lanes, entrances, exits — and watches what’s really going on in each of them. It uses that data to make real-time decisions about which zone needs which signal when. It can shorten wait times, skip or prolong signals, even back up to serve that one lonely car idling in a left-turn lane with nobody else around.
“The system is constantly tuning itself based on drivers’ real behaviors,” said Klug. “It allows incredible flexibility.”
New fiber-optic cables that link the lights in a given corridor and carry all that data back to the county’s traffic-control command post — Klug’s desk — will allow the software and its human overseers to tweak the behavior of the entire corridor. When construction blocks part of the road, Klug will be able to reset traffic zones with a couple of taps at his computer keyboard — molding traffic controls to the temporarily changed roadway in a way that wasn’t possible before.
Plus, he said, the mountain of data that video technology provides — all day, every day, all year — will be accurate and exhaustive, sortable and searchable. “I can send a person out to sit at an intersection and do turn counts for a couple hours, and it’ll cost me a hundred dollars,” Klug said — and it’ll still be only a tiny snapshot.
“There’ll be much better usage of better data to make better decisions,” he said.
Smiling optional
Incidentally, video detection doesn’t mean you’re on “Candid Camera” or that you can be caught and busted for individual bad behavior. Traffic data is collected, but video images are not recorded.
“There are all kinds of legal implications about video recording,” Klug said. “We’re not interested in who’s there. We’re just interested in how the traffic is moving.”
You can smile for the camera if you want to — or wave your fist at Big Brother — but nobody’s looking at your face. Just your wheels.
Video detection, while really smart, remains limited by what it can see. There’s traffic that can’t be seen — in dense fog, for example, or when twilight commuters have forgotten to switch on their headlights. That’s why the old loop-detection technology is still alive and backing up the video cameras.
“A lot of people drive around at dusk without their headlights on,” Klug said. “There are times the cameras aren’t going to see you. The loops will catch the vehicles that fall through the cracks of the primary system.”
Finally, there’s radar technology that has still other talents. Radar can see farther afield and determine the number and speeds of oncoming cars. That can be a big help when, for example, a parking lot outside the video detection zone is gridlocked. And, radar can identify pedestrians.
“That exceeds the capability of video,” said Klug. “All these different tools have different strengths. We’re putting them together.”
Long, shared corridors governed by different jurisdictions — such as Fourth Plain/state Highway 500 or Andresen and Padden/72nd Avenue — used to employ different signal technologies that simply couldn’t communicate, Wright said. But federal law now requires standardization of the computer chassis that holds traffic-control equipment, so engineers like Klug can plug different software modules into it and expect it to work.
Maestro
Wright calls Klug, who is designing, testing and operating all these systems, the county’s “traffic signal maestro who is making all these devices sing in tune.” Klug said he is figuring out how to customize equipment to push it to the very limit of its capabilities.
Klug said much — but not all — of the equipment needed to upgrade the Salmon Creek corridor is in the county shop right now, and he’s busy testing and customizing it to push it to the very limit of its capabilities. It’ll be installed over the next few months; he wasn’t willing to get more specific than that.
“We hope folks can be patient just a bit longer,” Wright said, “until the project is complete.”
Scott Hewitt: 360-735-4525 or scott.hewitt@columbian.com.
