If you have that one traffic light that you think always seems to turn red while you're driving up to it, or stays red for way too long, help could be on the way.
Hillsborough County is using new tracking technology in some of its lights that could help make traffic flow a little smoother.
The tech tracks vehicles, bikers and pedestrians at intersections over various periods of time. And it can get that data to traffic engineers within minutes.
"It changed the game,” said Rafael De Dios, an engineer associate at Hillsborough's Traffic Management Center. “It's changed the game with how we work with traffic. It's a different set of eyes. You know, give us the data that we never had, and we can actually make it more effective."
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The upfront cost for installing the new tech is pricier, said De Dios, but will save money and resources in the long run.
“It's basically the future,” De Dios said. “We have capabilities of accessing data that we never had before. In the past, we were relying on consultants to do some traffic counts and do the analysis for us.”
The county can track how the intersections fare minute-to-minute, as opposed to before, when human trackers could only get very specific times, said William Johnson, another engineer associate at the center.
“That data tends to be kind of static and not representative of the entire year,” Johnson said. “You have seasonal changes in volumes and things like that, that may not necessarily be caught when you have static data. So when you have this real-time data that we're collecting, it allows us to better optimize on a tighter schedule.”
Volume on a specific intersection could vary from week-to-week, if a holiday is approaching, or if the school year is in session, for example.
Before they started making the upgrades, Johnson said it could take years, and a lot of manual work to gather the data needed to change light cycles along one traffic corridor.
"Now our window moves from every five to 10 years to potentially every six to 12 months, or even sooner, depending on the on the on the need and the use case,” he said.
So far, the detection systems are in about 20% of the traffic lights the county owns and operates, with a goal to increase that to 80% within the next five years, said Johnson.
They can also share the data with different departments in the county, like Hillsborough County Public Schools, HART, FDOT, and others.
“For example, the south part of Hillsborough County right now is going through a major overhaul of interstate ramps, corridors, expansions, and we decided to put this technology ahead of those construction projects, so it'll help us analyze what was going to happen, before, during and after,” De Dios said.
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“In the past, you only had pre-construction and after-construction. And it was just us physically going down there and tweaking the signal timings as we saw fit. There's no way to collect data halfway through that process. So now this technology was able to give us that level of performance and understanding.”
The county is leaning on some federal grants for implementation of the data collecting technology, along with county funds when it’s made available.
It's also working on implementing other technology into the big metal cabinets that are at all intersections. That tech will have the ability to communicate certain messages from people’s vehicles to the transportation infrastructure.
That would help in the case of emergency vehicles needing to quickly get through an intersection, or if there’s a major build-up of traffic at one specific light. The technology could change re-timings on the fly, and let drivers know when a light is about to turn red or green.
Overall, Johnson said the county needs to invest in these types of technological advancements to keep up with the rapid growth in the county.
“We can only widen roads to a certain extent,” Johnson said. “County roadways so extremely important, definitely the wave of the future. Again, [the technology] allows us to start working smarter, as opposed to harder, and that in turn, transitions into cost savings.”
