by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
Last week, City Council president Jerry Holland, City Council member Lake Ray and a representative of the Jacksonville Transportation Authority went to Dallas to look at the Intelligent Transportation System. It didn’t take long for them to realize one the best ways Jacksonville can get a grip on its growing traffic woes is to adopt a similar plan.
“I call it Intelligent Traffic Signalization,” said Ray. “In a nutshell, it’s a monitoring of traffic signals across the city.”
Ray contends that Jacksonville is on the verge of having to adopt some sort of ITS for its roadways. Considering that Jacksonville grows in population every year and many of the city’s roadways have been expanded to the maximum, Ray is convinced the only way to better cope with rush hour traffic is to implement a traffic signalization system that has some sort of rhyme and reason to it.
Today, Jacksonville traffic is controlled by either timed lights — the kind you see on State and Union streets that are synchronized and allow traffic to flow smoothly — or actuated lights that are controlled by sensors in the road that cause the lights to turn. Those censors, which use metal detectors to identify vehicles, are primarily used where side roads intersect major thoroughfares and help residents get out of neighborhoods during peak traffic hours.
What Dallas employs — and what Ray wants for Jacksonville — is a system that combines both methods but takes the intelligence factor to another level. In addition to timed and actuated lights, Dallas’ traffic flow is also controlled and monitored by a high-tech eye in the sky. Many of the lights at major intersections also have live video cameras inside that are monitored, by real people, from a central location. If a traffic control engineer can see that traffic in one direction is significantly slower than the other direction, he has the discretion to alter the traffic signalization in an attempt to keep traffic flowing both directions. In essence, a robotic, remote traffic officer.
“That’s exactly what it will do,” said Ray. “The traffic patterns are controlled from a central system and they change depending on the day and time of day.
“We do not have anything like that here. What we have is in the downtown area and it’s a closed loop that’s basically timed and there’s nothing to override it. Dallas has it on virtually all their traffic signals.”
The issue, as with many citywide projects, is cost. According to Ray, the system can be installed all over Jacksonville over a several year period for about $50 million. The beauty, Ray said, is that the City wouldn’t have to absorb the entire cost. With several State and a few federal roads, the Florida Department of Transportation and the U.S. Department of Transportation could help defray a hefty chunk of the costs because many of Jacksonville’s most heavily traveled roads are State or federal roadways.
“I want the City Council to see this and I want JTA to see this,” said Ray. “I think it has a lot of applicability here.”
The Dallas system also features the use of electronic signs that help motorists. For example, during peak traffic periods, signs tell motorists the current rate of traffic flow and the approximate time between landmarks and other major intersections. That kind of information helps motorists in Dallas decide whether to stay on the road or take alternative routes.
Ray says the key to implementing such a system here isn’t as much about money as it is about getting all the entities to buy into the idea.
“The first thing the City Council, mayor’s office, the JTA, the DOT and the MPO [Metropolitan Planning Organization] need to do is all agree we need it,” said Ray. “With that agreement, we can develop a master plan for the whole city.”
Ray said the system should be implemented on one major thoroughfare first in an effort to demonstrate its effectiveness.
“We need to take a corridor such as Southside Boulevard, look it it, implement it, tweak the system and move on to the next corridor until we are systematically done with the whole city,” said Ray. “Everybody needs to buy into it because it’s important for the whole city.”