Vehicle Tags, Route Sensors Will Provide Planners With Best Traffic Information Ever

You can’t beam up to the Starship Enterprise with them, but the gizmos the Spokane Regional Transportation Council wants people to put in their cars could improve cross-town traffic.

The council needs about 100 volunteers willing to hang a small tag on the rear-view mirror of their cars. The tag contains a battery, a microchip and a tiny antenna.

Mr. Spock would not be impressed.

But traffic planners are. Sensors placed along key traffic routes around Spokane will record every passing of the 400 tags the council hopes to field. About 300 are already on the road.

Once a month, data will be collected from the sensors and examined. The SRTC began implementing the system in July and already has piles of information.

As far as Glenn Miles knows, no one has ever studied traffic this way. Miles, the council’s transportation manager, is convinced the tag system will give Spokane traffic planners their best data ever.

In the past, the information was gathered by paying someone to drive around the city. The council could only afford to do that a few weeks each year.

“It doesn’t take very long to figure out it’s expensive to have someone get stuck in traffic time after time,” Miles said.

The new sensors will collect data 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

That will give planners a continuous stream of data on how accidents, weather and the time of day affect the flow of buses, cars and trucks.

Armed with that information, the council can plan road improvements, fine-tune the timing of traffic signals, devise more efficient ways of re-routing traffic around highway accidents.

The tags are expected to last 10 years, and Miles hopes the data will keep flowing from them for almost that long.

The council got 400 tags and installed 16 sensors for $190,000. The federal government paid $165,000 of the bill; the council paid the rest.

In other parts of the country, the technology is used to collect money.

The microchip in the tags can be programmed with an identification number that can be used to bill drivers entering a toll road or using rental cars.

In some cities, tags on buses are read by sensors that open gates to fast-travel lanes on crowded freeways, Miles said.

Spokane residents who want to participate in the traffic study are asked to call 625-6981.

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