Today WSDOT is launching the first ATMS corridor (aka Smarter Highways) on northbound I-5 at 11am. Over the last year I have written about it here and here. This is the first ATMS system in the United States, and certainly is on the cutting edge of traffic management. Look for updates to this posts throughout the day as other media outlits report on it. I hope to vist the Traffic Managment Center tomorrow afternoon to watch the system in action.
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In defense of my home state: WSDOT is launching the second system in the country, but that is still great.
http://www.dot.state.mn.us/metro/news/10/07/28smartlanes.html
If they had launched ours on schedule they would have been first here.
Looks like the system here will be the first with signs that are regulatory, not advisory.
So is this more advanced than the speed limit signs on I-90 that tell you to slow down to 40 when traffic is already going only 30?
You mean the ones that sometimes say 45 and everyone ignores them and go 60 anyways?
We’ll see how it goes but I think this system will get much better compliance. The other ones were ATMS on the cheap and WSDOT knew that.
Yes, because the system is capable of managing individual lanes, whereas the I-90 variable speed signs apply to all lanes.
Perhaps the sign should point to the nearest place the reader can park by a light rail station. Now, that would be a smart highway sign.
A painted sign that pointed at TIB Station would work for that.
Say shouldn’t we be able to see them from the webcams? I currently do not see anything on the signs right now.
that likely indicates there are no incidents and the highway is flowing freely and doesnt need them at the moment.
Yeah. Watch the Albro Pl camera. I just got a screenshot showing them in action. That camera has a video feed as well but I can’t access it at work.
http://bit.ly/9ixDuu
[Off topic]
The cutting edge? “based on proven technology used in Europe for the past two decades. ”
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/News/2010/08/10_I-5SmarterHighwaysActivated.htm
I have to say though, they do look cool. We had a relative visiting from Los Angeles last week and she thought it seemed like a obvious idea that should have been deployed there about 20 years ago.
In this department (any many other areas of transportation) cutting edge in the US is about 10-15 years behind europe.
Perhaps apocryphal, but I was told of a senior IT manager who denied an employee’s request to use a relatively new piece of software on a project by stating: “We don’t want to be on the bleeding edge of technology.” That attitude sometimes seems to be the way we approach transportation issues in the US; we wait for other places to beat all the bugs out of a system, then toot our own horns when we construct something similar which operates fairly well from the start because many of the known issues have already been addressed.
If only we’d do that with “positive train control” and mainline rail safety regulation. Instead the FRA and the freight railroads have had a “not invented here” attitude….
British Columbia uses a similar system on Hwy 99 between Surrey and Richmond, as does Vancouver for contraflow reversals on the Lion’s Gate Bridge.
British Columbia uses the arrows for contraflow reversals for counterflow lanes but no speed reduction signs or real-time information on congestion.
I’d love to see if a system like this can help with bottlenecks like I-5 northbound into the city.
That’s where the lanes shrink down by one going into the Seneca exit, and a second sometimes going into a express only exit. Not to mention the traffic impacting on the right from I-90 traffic entering I-5 and traffic backed up on the Mercer exit.
Seems like if we can get all the cars into the two remaining lanes prior to all the turbulence, it would be worth something.
I’ll reserve judgement (well final judgement) for later. But going into it, I just don’t see what this does to help anything.
This requires a number of things it seems to actually work. The biggest one being enforcement. The video from the UK seems to state that the laws will be enforced with “digital technology”. Is that going to be done here? I’m thinking no. The first comment in the first article linked here talks about someone who lived in the UK where they had average speed cameras tracking your speed. That is not happening here. Not anytime soon. But please correct me if I’m wrong. When the speed is set to 50mph it will require police to make sure folks are going the right speed. Otherwise folks will disregard and go their normal speed unless they are encountering a traffic jam up ahead and slow down anyway, similar to what happens on I-90 now. And when a lane is X’d out you know how many folks will drive right up that empty lane? The same number (actually probably more) that drive in the HOV lane added to the number that cross the double white line on 167. Maybe it’ll just take time for people to “learn” the system. Let’s hope.
“Your honor, the state cannot prove that the signage was at that moment indicating the (blah blah for which I was issued a citation”
“Case dismissed”
Actually WSP already does this kind of enforcement over the pass.
Why wouldn’t the state be able to prove it? The signs are electronic and I’m assuming that there’s a log that shows what sign showed what speed at that time. If the speed limit has been 45 for the past three hours and you get stopped during that period, it shouldn’t be that difficult at all.
All you have to do is question whether the pixels were visible, was the sign powered during entire incident, could the 60 Hz (?) flicker cause one not to see the text and symbols, etc.