Traffic signals in Richardson will be retimed thanks to hardware upgrades. Photo by Noah Whitehead | Photo Editor.
A
recently completed traffic study found Richardson traffic volume at its highest
in over a decade, prompting officials to update traffic light infrastructure.
The study, conducted by engineering firm Big Red Dog, took
three years and monitored traffic at signals throughout Richardson. The
director of transportation engineering for Big Red Dog, Dan Hennessey, said the
study showed a 1% year-over-year traffic volume increase from 2016 to 2018.
Following the study, the North Central Texas Council of Governments gave
$928,000 to the City of Richardson, after the city applied for $1.2 million,
toward improving detection equipment and retiming around 100 traffic signals
throughout Richardson.
“(Traffic)
increased about between 10-15% since roughly 2011, and so now traffic volume
goes back to where they were in their peak sometime around 2001 or 2002,”
Hennessey said.
Robert Saylor, the city of Richardson’s traffic
engineering and operations manager, said the Big Red Dog study was a
comprehensive analysis of Richardson’s traffic.
“It was
analyzing the performance and then comparing it to the cities and comparable
arterials and locations in surrounding communities,” Saylor said. “It was more
of a high-level analysis — it was not a detailed analysis of intersection by
intersection.”
The study includes three
main recommendations for improving traffic management in Richardson — updating
the traffic signal cabinet and controller equipment, upgrading vehicle
detection and updating traffic management system software. The city will update
both the traffic signal cabinet and controller equipment — a process that can
only be done on-site — as well as updating vehicle detection, which currently
only monitors traffic at individual traffic signals using electromagnetic loops
underneath the road surface that are less accurate than video detection.
“The
existing (vehicle) detection is mostly in-pavement electromagnetic loops which
are fine for individual signals, but they make it hard to manage a system,”
Hennessey said. “The city is currently upgrading all of that to video
detection, which will then in the future allow them to watch all intersections
from their offices instead of having to visit a site (to view traffic).”
Assistant Director of Transportation and Mobility Mark Titus said the
city applied for funding for vehicle detection upgrades to be made at 80
intersections and was awarded funding for 60 intersections. Titus also said
that the city was awarded funding for retiming over half the intersections in
Richardson.
“For the signal
retiming project, we applied for funding to retime 120 of our 128 signals and
then got awarded funding for 80 of those, which is pretty good,” Titus said.
“That’s still over half of our signals.”
Hennessey said
congestion occurred mostly during peak periods at expected locations such as
major intersections and areas near U.S. Route 75. He also said UTD is a factor
in the congestion in northwest Richardson.
“It’s the result
of having a big, healthy, active university, and that’s not a good thing or a
bad thing, but it’s one of the issues that the city is going to have to be
aware of as they attempt to manage traffic west of 75 and along Campbell and
north of it,” Hennessey said.
Design and
production junior Rousvel Flores said the traffic in Richardson affects how he plans
his class schedule.
“I have more
classes on certain days rather than have it evenly spread out … because I’d
rather not come to campus, waste gas and get stuck in traffic when I could be
doing homework instead,” Flores said.