Smart Signal Project Expands in Contra Costa County

New traffic management technology is being deployed in the San Francisco Bay Area, introducing one county to a connected, coordinated system to better manage the movement of thousands of vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians and other roadway users.

The Contra Costa Transportation Authority (CCTA) is leading a Smart Signals Project to upgrade about 365 intersections along key arterials known as Routes of Regional Significance, across Contra Costa County’s 19 cities and unincorporated areas.

“We cannot simply build our way out of congestion,” Tim Haile, CCTA executive director, said in an email. “We also have to operate the transportation system we already have more intelligently. That requires connected infrastructure, real-time information and the ability to work across jurisdictional lines.”

Contra Costa County is home to nearly 1.2 million residents on the eastern side of the greater Bay Area metro region. Like many parts of the Bay Area, it is plagued by traffic congestion and is turning to innovations in traffic management, transit and other approaches to improve mobility, rather than building new roads. The county has about 1,200 signalized intersections.

“Cities and towns across Contra Costa County have been steadily investing in smarter signal technology for years, but those efforts have largely been local,” Haile said. “This is the first time we are bringing all 19 cities and towns and the unincorporated county together in a coordinated, countywide effort designed to benefit the entire region.”

CCTA is establishing a Transportation Management Center (TMC), which will provide a central operating environment where the agency can view and analyze information shared by participating jurisdictions and develop a countywide picture of traffic conditions, Andy Dillard, CCTA senior engineer, said.

Under this arrangement, local jurisdictions continue to operate their own signal systems, while a center-to-center connection will allow those systems to share information with CCTA as upgraded intersections come online.

CCTA has begun purchasing the needed equipment and plans to begin deploying it in October, officials said. Integration with the TMC will occur as intersections come online rather than waiting until every installation is complete.

Derq, a cloud-based video analytics platform, will serve as the primary technology tool, processing data from the various video detection systems in place across the county. Cameras and other sensors at intersections will capture data related to vehicle movements, pedestrian and cyclist activity, which will be analyzed in real time by the TMC, officials said.

“Derq provides the analytics layer. It can process information from several different video-detection systems and bring it into one platform. Together, those tools will give us a real-time, countywide picture we have never had before,” Dillard said in an email.

The data can also be brought into CCTA’s data management system, giving planners new information to develop and refine models that more accurately represent how the countywide transportation network operates.

The project did not evolve from a single pilot but is more of a natural evolution as communities have been upgrading traffic signals, Dillard said. Those modernizations are part of what enables the sharing of data back to the county traffic management center.

The project will allow new operational abilities in Contra Costa County such as transit and emergency vehicle priority, Dillard said during a CCTA podcast earlier this year.

“With the center-to-center system, instead of each city working in a silo and sharing data only when someone requests it, we can bring those locally operated systems into a countywide view,” Dillard said. “As intersections come online, we will begin building a real-time, second-by-second picture of how the network is performing. That is unprecedented for us and will make the information much more useful for both operations and long-range planning.”

Over time, the Smart Signals system can be further optimized to connect more intelligently with local street signals and freeway ramp metering, Haile said. The project is also being designed to support future vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, applications, which let vehicles interact with surrounding infrastructure.

*This article was originally published by Government Technology, Industry Insider — California's sister publication.