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Issued: November 2001

SUMMARY

The two-year traffic signals upgrade project successfully installed many core elements of a modern traffic system. However, our traffic signal system is not fully upgraded and several planned features were only partially addressed. Much of the fiber-optic cabling was not installed in the central business district, and the majority of the new signal controllers have not been wired into the new traffic computer system. The Transportation, Planning, and Sustainability Department (TPSD) is not ready to share real-time traffic information because the majority of the planned system detector loops were not installed and because plans on how to share data have not been finalized.

TPSD staff was able to demonstrate the functionality and capabilities of the new system, although we are unsure if enough employees were trained as intended. In addition, we successfully tested the redundancy features of the signals upgrade, but TPSD has not developed guidelines to use these features to recover from disasters or unforeseen events.

Also, this two-year project to upgrade to a modern traffic management system was only the first step toward the City’s six-year vision of an intelligent transportation system. In order to achieve this larger vision, the TPSD must help feed data from the new system to roadway planning efforts and to incident management efforts. In addition, real-time data needs to go to other agencies and to the public in order to help them navigate around existing conditions as smoothly as possible.

Although not responsible for responding to unplanned incidents (such as traffic accidents), the TPSD could be helping the APD to minimize the resulting delays. In addition, City data on planned disruptions (such as construction blocking roadways) is difficult to obtain and therefore hard to monitor. Thus, additional work is clearly needed both in terms of finishing the system upgrade and achieving the complex coordinating and planning efforts needed to go beyond a traffic system to an intelligent transportation system. However, how the work will be funded is not clear.

Click here to go to our audit request form to request a hard copy of this report (Report No. AU01302) or download the entire text of the Transportation, Planning, and Sustainability Department: Traffic Flow and Signalization audit (Size: 1610 KB) in Adobe Acrobat. You will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader to view these files.

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