Politics & Government
Smart Traffic Signals Installed on Lapeer Road
Lapeer Road has 12 new "smart" traffic signals that will improve traffic flow and reduce car accidents.
The following news was submitted by the Road Commission for Oakland County:
The Road Commission for Oakland County (RCOC) installed “smart” traffic signals on Lapeer Road in Orion Township and the Village of Lake Orion.
The $850,000 project includes 12 traffic signals on Lapeer Road, running from the Brown Road intersection (on the south) to the signal at the crossover just north of Indianwood Road (at the north). RCOC designed the signal portion of the project and assisted MDOT in overseeing the project implementation.
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RCOC’s Faster And Safer Travel-Through Routing & Advanced Controls (FAST-TRAC) traffic signals use technology to continuously detect the amount of traffic present at an intersection and adjust signal timing in real time to most efficiently move that traffic.
“This is real win/win technology,” RCOC Chairman Eric Wilson said. “We’re very pleased to have assisted MDOT to expand the system to the M-24 corridor.”
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The project included modernizing the actual signals at many of the intersections, including converting them to energy-saving LED bulbs, as well as upgrading the pedestrian crosswalks at the intersections to make them compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
FAST-TRAC: The reach and bonuses
FAST-TRAC is the second-largest adaptive traffic signal system in the nation, and is currently in place at more than 675 intersections in the county. Now, through the Lapeer Road project, RCOC has worked with the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) to expand the system onto additional state highways as well.
“FAST-TRAC has been proven to improve traffic flow and reduce serious injury accidents,” Wilson said. “With this system, we can get some additional vehicle capacity out of a road without widening the road, while also making the road safer. That’s a substantial benefit and a great bang for the buck.”
Wilson added that RCOC was the first agency to use video-imaging technology for traffic management, and maintains the largest such system in the world, with more than 2,000 vehicle-detection cameras currently in the air.
Independent studies of RCOC’s FAST-TRAC system by Michigan State University and others have documented that the system has reduced traffic delays. A study of the system in Troy also documented a reduction of more than 50 percent in serious injury crashes following the installation of the system.
