Street smarts: Huntsville green lights application

HUNTSVILLE – The Huntsville City Council passed a resolution it hopes can make navigating Bob Wallace Avenue, which intersects other heavily-traveled corridors, easier and “smarter.”

The resolution aimed at traffic flow at the Bob Wallace intersections with Leeman Ferry Road and Memorial Parkway authorizes an application for a U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) Grants Program.

“Traffic engineering has an IT department of its own, its intelligent traffic systems, so we certainly have servers and some cameras and fiber connected at a lot of our intersections that allows us to change timing depending on times of day to move traffic and heavy volumes in areas,” said Shane Davis, Huntsville’s Director of Economic and Urban Development. “This would be in partnership with (the Alabama Department of Transportation). We really want to synchronize the Bob Wallace area along the parkway.

“There’s some turning movements under the parkway. If we can get all those controls in a smart system, as we call it, to where our traffic signals on Bob Wallace are talking to the service roads signals that ALDOT maintains, we think we can really move that core. We think it will compete well. It fits the category of the grant funding that the SMART grants are doing. In short, this is going to be able to move more traffic faster.”

Governors Drive, University Drive and Jordan Lane are three other corridors the city monitors heavily. The new grant would be a continuation of the city’s goal of synchronizing lights to provide the most efficient traffic at peak times.

“This grant would help us accelerate and leverage our funds with some federal funds to do more,” Davis said. “But we’ve been implementing this now for almost 20 years. So I think most all of our major intersections, our major arterials, most of those are all connected. So now we’re into collector streets and tiering that down Bob Wallace kind of being one of those. And this one’s unique in that what we’re trying to link is we have a lot of intelligent traffic communication at our intersection of Bob Wallace.

“But when we get to the parkway, that’s where the disconnect becomes because you’ve got the state system. So this through federal process allows to link those together.”

Regarding intersection cameras, Davis added, “We’re not grabbing people’s license plates or trying to ticket people through there. It’s actually counting cars.”