Atlanta Nightside: Keeping traffic flowing

If you've got a traffic problem -- and let's face it, we all have traffic problems -- Ron Boodhoo is your guy.

As operations manager at Georgia's Transportation Management Center near Grant Park, Boodhoo helps oversee a team of about 40 people. They are the force behind the 511 hotline, providing traffic information to callers. The TMC works with police and fire departments as well as the transportation department's "highway emergency response operators" -- personnel trained to respond to incidents and clear the roads to restore normal traffic flow. Meanwhile, the TMC's network of cameras and sensors feeds the color-coded maps at www.georgia-navigator.com, directing motorists to roads showing a green, free-flowing drive.

Originally from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, Boodhoo also spent time in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Florida, where he worked on undergraduate and master's degrees in engineering at the University of Central Florida. After a stint working for a consultant in the Sunshine State, Boodhoo moved to Georgia and has been working for the TMC for about six years. His regular shift is late morning to night. But when awful weather strikes -- such as during the floods of 2009 or the ice storms this month -- the work goes into the wee hours.

"You have to pull up your sleeves and help out as needed," said Boodhoo, 33. This is his job, in his words.

When it comes to crashes or incidents, we'll often find out about it from a motorist or one of our "heroes." We've got 500 closed-circuit cameras that pan, tilt and zoom. We have a map that's color coded. We're looking at the speeds. We've got probably 1,500 cameras scattered around the Atlanta metro area that can count the vehicles, how fast the vehicles are going. They track "occupancy," which means how long the vehicle is over a certain point. We've got different kinds of technology.

The (Georgia Navigator) map is processed from our video detection cameras. There's some kind of complicated algorithm going on. The data that comes in is very robust, and it's down to 20-second chunks.

You kind of jump in as needed. My hours are 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., but when you have a situation like we did a few days ago, with the ice, that was a 19-hour shift. I'm constantly on call. We deal with a lot of situations, everything from a tractor-trailer that's overturned on a ramp, to someone who's thinking about jumping onto an interstate. Sometimes you're dealing with fender-benders, but sometimes you're looking at things that might cause an hour-long delay.

The 19-hour shift was crazy. Those are the situations where you have to keep your wits about you. During snow and ice, we've got our district maintenance people that are scattered all over the place. We've got our district maintenance folks that are telling us when things are being cleared. Ramps are really, really important. Those tend to ice up pretty quickly.

When I first started in college, I thought I was going to be a teacher, studying mathematics. But I wanted to find a practical way to apply mathematics. I wasn't enjoying the formulas and theories as much. I discovered there is a lot of value in intelligent transportation systems.

When we have a situation that's a big accident, I have friends that might be in the back-up and they call me, ask what's happening. People will ask, ‘why did it take me so long to get home?' I live on the south side of the city in Fairburn. So when I leave the office at 7:30, traffic is wonderful. I try to minimize my travel time. Being an engineer, we care about minimizing our travel times.

The worst situation I've seen was probably that flooding (in 2009), when the Downtown Connector was underwater. I don't know how many calls we had to 511. It was probably 35,000 or 40,000 calls. That's everybody in the office taking calls. That was a nasty situation. The snow and ice situation, you kind of expect to see one or two of those a year.

I'm on standby all the time. We get our scheduling taken care of at least a week in advance. If you have snow and ice conditions, maybe we need a "hero" to go pick somebody up from their house. We are in the process now of going to a new system that's going to give me the ability to log in from home and manage an incident. I can manage a changeable message sign. I don't have the capability to do that now.