Holiday shoppers will have several new tools to plot their travel strategy this season and more high-tech help is on the way.
The Ohio Department of Transportation has installed 18 of 21 message boards planned for the Akron area. About 30 cameras of major traffic areas are working, with a total of 66 planned. A website that shows freeway speeds is already up and running.
Next year, a smart-phone application will receive traffic advisories for your commute every day before you leave home, three AM radio stations will broadcast up-to-the-minute traffic updates and you will be able to call a telephone number to plan your path.
The information will help your long-distance travel, too.
“If you are in Akron and call from your cell phone from Akron, it will first present you the Akron information, but it will give you the option to switch to Cleveland if that is where you are going,” said George Saylor, senior ITS engineer for the Ohio Department of Transportation.
Once you get off the freeway, private industry is taking data from cell phones and GPS devices to show traffic flow on regular streets.
That means the next time you go to the mall on a busy shopping day, you will be able to look online at color-coded maps to get an idea of traffic congestion. Red lines along your path mean traffic is stop and go. Yellow means it’s moving well, especially for a surface street. Green lines mean you are up to freeway speeds.
If traffic is blocked after you get under way, one of the new state message boards can alert you. The boards cost about $200,000 each.
Only three message boards are yet to be activated. All are the kind that are on structures that arch over the road, not along the berm.
Some restrictions
There are limitations.
You might learn a lane ahead is blocked, but the message boards are unlikely to tell you what alternates to take.
“People ask us this question a lot and it’s a very valid question,” Saylor said. “ ‘Why don’t you give me a detour route?’ Well it’s you and 500 or 1,000 other people going to different places, so if I give you a detour it might not be good for somebody else.”
Saylor also said the state is reluctant to direct freeway traffic onto municipally maintained streets that are not designed to handle that volume.
A sign on state Route 8 near Chapel Hill Mall might say:
“Minutes to:
76/77 4 MI 4
US224 6 MI 7”
Saylor said the goal is to keep the message brief.
“We do have the ability to put up two more panels, but the issue is that for most speeds anything more than two panels is excessive and we really don’t want to slow people down,” he said.
He also said the signs are designed more for inbound traffic than drivers leaving the city and priority is given to helping drivers passing through an area instead of local commuters. That’s why there is a sign on Interstate 77 at Copley Road in Akron that faces southbound traffic, but there is no help for vehicles moving north.
A lot of the information comes from hundreds of speed sensors that are updated every minute. Information from those sensors is handled by SpeedInfo Inc. of San Jose, Calif., under a contract with the state and can be sold to private companies.
Because the system has been installed incrementally, Saylor said, it is difficult to say whether traffic and safety have improved since the boards started appearing this year. But he said national research shows a 25 percent reduction of “secondary crashes” — the fender benders that happen when vehicles are traveling too fast to stop for an accident ahead.
The state displays it’s information at www.buckeyetraffic.org/, but that information will be delivered directly into your car sometime in the next year.
Automated services
By dialing 511 on your telephone, you will get local reports. Pressing more buttons will deliver out-of-town information that could help you all the way to Cincinnati.
The smart-phone application, which will be advertising, supported and run by a private company, will provide all of the above information, but will also take your commute into account and send you a text message with traffic news every day tailored to fit your commute.
The radio stations will provide much of the same information from three locations in Akron.
Most of these services will be automated, meaning no one will be employed to look at the data and voice it for the radio; a computer will do the work.
The nerve center is in a 1,500-square-foot office in Columbus that operates from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. with just five full-time employees and some part timers. Saylor said the program will have a $4 million-a-year budget when fully implemented.
The state information is just for freeways. Most other traffic information comes from private data-mining companies monitoring cell phones. Saylor said that information, while useful, is several minutes old, unlike the state data that is never older than a minute. As cell phones and GPS units become more popular, the data should improve, he said.
Dave Scott can be reached at 330-996-3577 or davescott@thebeaconjournal.com.