GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo — Computers could soon control your daily commute down a south suburban road.
Three cities are working together to make traffic signals along Yosemite Street run adaptive. Greenwood Village, Centennial and Lone Tree plan to activate the adaptive lights after the holiday season.
“Probably five percent of the signals in the metro area are running adaptive today,” said Jeremy Hanak, public works director for Greenwood Village. “And I would say a majority of those deployments are a single agency.”
The collaboration between the three cities is unique, as most signal control doesn’t cross city boundaries.
“On Yosemite Street, you go between Greenwood Village, Centennial and Lone Tree in the blink of an eye,” he said.
The system will use cameras at intersections and sensors that find MAC addresses (essentially an identification number on your device) from Bluetooth devices to measure traffic flow.
“When it reads it at one intersection, it can time stamp it and then when it reads it at the next intersection we get a sense of how well traffic is flowing along a corridor,” Hanak said about the sensors.
The information is then sent to the cloud where it is analyzed and used to control signals in real-time.
“It’ll allow our signals to adjust in real-time to deal with that traffic as it exists,” said Justin Schmitz, public works director in Lone Tree.
Schmitz said the new program will be a big improvement from how the corridor currently works.
“If you drive along the system the signals are coordinated together – that means as you drive you should get as many green lights as you can, but it doesn’t have a chance to deal with any changes to the environment or any volume changes that happen,” he said.
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