The Newport Beach, Calif., city council agreed last week to buy a traffic-monitoring system to be placed in several locations in the area that will ping signals off Bluetooth-enabled equipment to build a real-time profile of motorists’ routes and travel times.
Generally when the city wants to time its traffic signals, it runs a study over a couple of days. The newly approved BlueTOAD system will gather unique but anonymous “signature” data in real time.
Equipment and software will cost about $119,000 and include 12 detection devices to be placed along the Balboa Peninsula, MacArthur Boulevard, Newport Coast Drive and Coast Highway. The California Department of Transportation already has its own BlueTOAD devices on Coast Highway.
Traffic engineers can get an idea of congestion by comparing the time it takes a car to get from one detection device to another, or the city can study patterns that show strategic routes. The data is aggregated to show trends with no private information. The city’s system is expected to be in place by the beginning of 2018.
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Source: Los Angeles Times
