DOT takes traffic light timing regional

By Ariel Hart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Even Jessie Tuggle, Superbowl alumnus and retired Atlanta Falcon, is no match for metro Atlanta rush hour. As Tuggle took a break from traffic to fill up at a Chevron near the border of Gwinnett and Fulton counties Monday afternoon, the westbound cars at the light sat still, backed up more than half a mile. Like anyone else, he’s not sure why.

“I spend a lot of days and hours on this road here,” he said, eyeing Holcomb Bridge Road, part of Ga. 140, with a rueful smile. “It’s always busy, always crowded.”

It turns out that the county border itself could be part of the problem. And the state hopes to do something about it.

The stretch of Ga. 140 that Tuggle travels crosses Gwinnett County and the city of Roswell and each of them has its own traffic light system. The Atlanta region’s political patchwork of counties, cities and towns is also a patchwork of transportation jurisdictions, each trying to make traffic plans for roads that don’t end at government borders.

That might not have been such a problem when county transportation was a simple matter of building and paving, but with high-tech traffic systems emerging, borders can work against compatibility and fast synchronization. And although the state and local governments have invested more than $500 million in traffic management systems and control centers over the last two decades, according to the state Department of Transportation, a good portion of it has aged out, broken down or become incompatible with new technology, traffic officials said. Seeing the problem, the state Department of Transportation is stepping in -- with baby steps.

DOT has signed a five-year contract for up to $35 million with the engineering firm Arcadis to repair and manage a handful of regional surface street corridors, including Tuggle's Ga. 140/Ga. 92 corridor that stretches through portions of Gwinnett, north Fulton and Cobb counties. DOT hopes a more coordinated effort at traffic light timing will ease congestion. It’s one of a handful of “intelligent transportation” initiatives Georgia has undertaken in recent years to attack traffic jams without shelling out for increasingly expensive road widening.

“Regional traffic signal systems is a big area the Federal Highway Administration is really pushing,” said Kevin Balke, director of the Texas-based Translink Research Center. “Traffic knows no jurisdictional boundary. The traveling public cares about getting from their origin to their destination.”

Each dollar invested to change a poorly timed corridor into an excellent one may yield about $40 in commuter time, Balke said.

In the Las Vegas area, where towns and the county banded together to manage traffic regionally, it’s working, said Brian Hoeft, assistant director for the FAST program at the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada.

“This gives us the opportunity to disregard unnatural boundaries, political lines on map, and focus on what needs to happen on the streets,” he said. As a patchwork, even if one jurisdiction did successful timing while another didn’t, he said, drivers who zoomed through the first jurisdiction may only wind up stuck at red lights in the second.

Although Georgia is taking on 134 miles of road in the regional program, the ten-county region contains 18,000 miles of road, with about 4,000 traffic signals, according to DOT. The vast majority of those roads are smaller ones that may be best managed by the local jurisdiction anyway. A few of them are expressways, which the state already manages. What DOT is targeting now is arterial surface roads, usually state routes, that currently fall under local jurisdictions but are heavily traveled enough to warrant a bigger effort.

On Piedmont Road, for example, commuter Jamaine Butts described rush-hour traffic as “ridiculous.” One day last week he stood watching as cars backed up in Piedmont’s center lane for blocks. At little Morosgo Drive, a traffic light held Piedmont traffic back while turning green for Morosgo traffic. Except that there was almost no Morosgo traffic.

It was hard to tell if better light timing would help an already cloggedPiedmont, but Butts said it’s worth a try.

“I feel it can be better,” he said.

Officials at the city of Atlanta, which has managed Piedmont Road, welcome the investment. True, the city has already installed computerized traffic signals along Piedmont and at almost all of the city’s 935 intersections, as well as cameras and underground cables in many spots. I

But time takes a toll, technology goes out of date, equipment wears out and utility crews cut into underground cable. Of the 500 to 600 intersections that the city rigged with remote control, only 175 can be remotely controlled now, said Santana Herrera, the city’s traffic systems engineer.

“There’s not a competition between [jurisdictions]," said Michael Cheyne, Atlanta’s interim commissioner of public works. "We’re all in the same business of trying to improve traffic. So the more we can do that collaboratively, the better for the public. ... The overarching issue is that there’s more need and demand than there are funds to meet that."

Even along the corridors it manages, DOT is not taking over completely. Arcadis’ first job will be to inventory what kind of equipment is in use on the corridor and to diagnose problems. Then it will draw up plans to fix some of it and, in some places, install new equipment. It’s too early to predict just what equipment will go where, said Grant Waldrop, DOT’s regional traffic operations manager. Technology available two years from now might not even exist yet.

“That’s an industry that’s rapidly developing,” he said.

The main task will be active management, Waldrop said, where staff will actively monitor morning and evening rush hours along the corridors, identify signal problems and fix them. As things stand now, many jurisdictions only have resources to trouble-shoot after a motorist calls in with a problem.

After rush hour is over, corridor management will go back to the local jurisdiction.

Not all jurisdictions want to turn over even that much control. Cobb County, which has a robust signal system and new traffic operations center, is part of DOT’s program but has taken the “local lead” on its portion, meaning that it will still re-time its own lights but will clear changes with DOT.

According to Brook Martin, who manages Cobb’s traffic signal system, the county has working remote control of 417 of its 535 signalized intersections. Some of those are high-tech corridors where the signals re-time themselves based on computerized traffic measurements.

DOT is still working out which of the 13 affected jurisdictions will take the local lead and what type of infrastructure each corridor will wind up having. The program doesn’t stop the locals from continuing with already existing projects; the Atlanta Community Improvement District and the city of Atlanta are installing wireless radio signals on some downtown intersections as a pilot project and Roswell is working with other jurisdictions to install self-timing light systems.

Tom Sever, who manages intelligent transportation for Gwinnett County, hopes the DOT program will physically connect the signal communications across the Chattahoochee River.

“That may sound simple, but if you have different signals and everything’s 20 seconds different, that can create a real mess,” Sever said.

Back on Ga. 140, Tuggle doesn’t know if it will work, but he’s all for trying.

“The region is the most important,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to break it up.”

The Roads Traveled

Over the next five years, Georgia DOT is helping manage the traffic lights along these surface-street corridors. DOT will repair equipment and oversee the operations during rush hour.

First Up:

• Ga. 42/U.S. 23/Moreland Ave. from I-285 to Ponce De Leon Ave.
• Ga. 92/Crossville Rd. from Downsby Ln. to Mansell Rd.
• Ga. 140/Holcomb Bridge Rd./Jimmy Carter Blvd. from Ga. 9 to Shelby Dr.
• Ga. 141/Peachtree Rd./Peachtree Industrial Blvd./Peachtree Pkwy./Medlock Bridge Rd. from Ga. 9 to Deerlake Dr.
• Ga. 237/Piedmont Rd. from Monroe Dr. to Habersham Rd.

Next:

• U.S. 41/Tara Blvd. from Lovejoy Rd. to Morrow Rd.
• U.S. 41/Cobb Pkwy./Northside Dr. from Howell Mill Rd. to Lake Acworth Dr.
• Ga. 8/Ponce De Leon Ave./Scott Blvd./Lawrenceville Hwy. from Juniper St. to Montreal Rd.
• Ga. 9/Peachtree Rd./Roswell Rd. from Deering Rd. to Azalea Dr.
• Ga. 10/U.S. 78 from E. Park Place to Scenic Hwy.
• Ga. 85 from Grady Ave. to I-75

Source: Georgia DOT

Managing Congestion

Faced with the untenable costs of road widening, agencies across metro Atlanta have turned in desperation to "smart" traffic solutions:

• Traffic control centers, managing computerized traffic signals and dispatching repair crews and emergency responders
• Computerized traffic signals, underground cables, computerized message signs
• Georgia Towing and Recovery Incentive Program, to get wreckers to clear Interstate crashes faster
• Ramp meters, red lights that regulate entrance ramp flow onto Interstates
• HERO units, that help crash or stall victims off the Interstate
• HOT lanes, where the toll price rises with congestion, to provide solo drivers a moving lane for a fee
• Bus shoulder lanes, where buses and emergency vehicles on Ga. 400 can bypass traffic when speeds fall below 35 mph
• Transit expansion, including park-and-ride lots for GRTA buses and MARTA passengers

Meet the reporter

Ariel Hart has covered transportation for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 2005. She has written about traffic congestion, road safety, mass transit, the turn toward toll roads and the politics of transportation, including what lobbyists and vendors spend on transportation officials.

She grew up in Arizona, attended Bryn Mawr College and served three years with the Peace Corps in the Czech Republic and Russia. Before coming to the AJC she was a freelance reporter. She earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.

Follow her on Twitter @ajcTransport

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