In my 40 plus years with municipalities, and different State DOT’s,
the frustrations of signal timing have never been easy.
A green for some is still a red for others. You can never make
everyone happy.
All you can do is reduce delays and try to increase safety.
We have come a long way baby! Forty years ago, traffic signal timing
consisted of inserting keys in a dial to determine your green,
yellow and red timing.
The dial was a simple 90 seconds, depending on the gear you had
installed.
Then along came electronics and the signal timing world changed
forever.
Today we have coordination timing, logic processors, variable
initial timing, delayed calls,
advance ped start times, and entire host options to assist with
moving cars,
bikes and pedestrians safely through an intersection and down a
corridor.
Synchro has been a great tool to assist Traffic Engineers to
determine how to take advantage of the available options
in the controllers and insert traffic volumes to ensure that all
directions are serviced adequately.
It has been a great starting point to develop traffic signal timing
based on demand.
Develop your timing plans, deploy them and then drive the corridor
to see the results.
Come back to the office, adjust and drive it again. After two or
three iterations of this,
you might have a coordination plan that works. All while you review
the time/space diagram to determine what you missed.
Now we use WaySync to eliminate the guess work. We can import the
Synchro data directly into the program,
do the fine adjustments on the computer (WaySync D), then drive the
corridor,
all while recording your virtual position in the green band,
and record video of the run to determine what was different than
expected during the run, like pre-emption,
side friction and other delays that may not have been evident in
your modelling of the corridor (WaySync M).
If you haven’t tried WaySync, it is worth your time and effort to
realize the benefits and eliminate the guessing.
Read the other testimonials and decide for yourself. I can’t wait to
see what AI will do with WaySync.
Don’t be afraid to use technology that works.
Bruce Dressel
Senior Transportation Engineer, City of Buckeye, Az.