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Antiquated Stoplights Put Dallas in a Jam, No Fix in Sight

The city’s Department of Street Services is pushing for an overhaul of the system, which could take 25 years and $200 million to accomplish.

About 80 percent of the stoplights in Dallas are outdated.

And problems with the aging signal system won’t be fixed any time soon.

Pressed for money over the years, the Dallas City Council has deferred maintenance on the city’s 1,500 traffic signals, many of which are technological dinosaurs. The computer system behind the red, green and yellow lights isn’t supported by the manufacturer anymore, and the lights themselves are relics of the 1980s.

The city’s Department of Street Services is pushing for an overhaul of the system, which could take 25 years and $200 million to accomplish.

Where that money would come from, City Council members say, is anybody’s guess.

The city doesn’t have a program to prevent traffic signals from failing by installing new lights on a schedule when the old ones have exceeded their predicted lifespan. Instead, it employs the age-old “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach.

A lot of them get broken.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, a traffic signal dangled from its supporting beam over Cedar Springs Road at Turtle Creek Boulevard. A crew from Street Services put out orange traffic cones to block one lane of Cedar Springs, where the crew’s truck was parked. The stoplights in all directions were switched to flash red, meaning drivers were to treat the intersection as a four-way stop.

A truck carrying something tall, like a ladder, had probably hit the dangling traffic signal.

“It broke the head and dented the pole,” said Richard Clark, an electrician with Street Services, looking up at the mangled stoplight.

“Something definitely hit it right there,” said Chris Swindell, another crew member. “There’s stuff broken on it. That pole’s all bent up — we’ll put a new pole on it.”

In a truck-mounted crane, Clark ascended toward the broken signal.

He disconnected it from its wires, exposing a fistful of colored cords. After getting the damaged light down, he mounted a new one in its place.

On average, one of these repairs crops up every day. Whether signals are damaged during storms or their supporting poles are hit by cars, or aged hardware just gives out, the street services crews spend a lot of time in cranes above Dallas intersections.

The traffic signal maintenance team responded to about 30 “knockdowns” in May. A broken or leaning support pole was at the root of about half of the repairs. It’s rarer for the stoplight itself to be damaged. Other repairs involved broken pedestrian signals and traffic signal cabinets.

These daily repairs, undertaken after a signal has failed or been damaged, may be the only thing that keeps the well-worn system from crumbling entirely.

Dire warnings

Last Nov. 20, the Department of Street Services presented a proposed traffic signal replacement program to the City Council. The department’s briefing depicted a system in dire need of attention. There were pictures of stoplights that had been battered or knocked down entirely.

The department recommended updating 60 traffic signals a year for the next 25 years. This would upgrade the entire system by 2040, at a cost of $250 million.

After the briefing, nothing happened.

Aurobindo Majumdar, the department’s assistant director of transportation operations, noted that traffic signals are just one of the city’s many street-related needs.

The invisible hand of stoplight operations in Dallas is a central computer system that controls the timing of lights and relays a message when a signal malfunctions. That computer system is “at risk of failure,” according to the Street Services briefing to the council.

If the central computer were to fail, signals would fall out of sync, and Dallas streets could quickly become congested to the point of being impassable.

The signals would also lose communication with the traffic management center, which could result in stoplight malfunctions going unnoticed.

It’s not quite an image out of the apocalypse, but it might seem that way for Dallas drivers trying to get from point A to point B.

Street Services is in the process of modernizing the computer system through a program launched in December, at a cost of $12.5 million. The updating should be completed by the fall of 2016.

Keeping drivers happy

Antiquated traffic-signal systems are hardly exclusive to Dallas. Many big cities face the same problem, said Sean Merrell, a former traffic engineer for the city of Frisco who now works for a private engineering firm.

Merrell, the former president of the Dallas chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said the sheer number of lights that need to be replaced across the country creates a challenge that will take decades to overcome.

Drivers don’t care about traffic signals until a broken light stands between them and their destination, he said.

“They’re very angry, they’re upset,” Merrell said. “Yet they’re driving through … dozens of traffic signals every day, and as long as they’re working there’s no problem.”

Even Dallas City Council members who aren’t pleased about the state of the city’s traffic signals say the money’s just not there to replace 60 traffic signals a year — not now, anyway.

Sandy Greyson, a member of the council’s transportation committee, said she’s “dismayed” that the request must be deferred for at least another year, calling the matter a “public safety issue.”

But replacement of old traffic signals hasn’t come close to being a top priority in the discussions about next fiscal year’s budget.

Council member Philip Kingston said he thinks the council was blindsided by Street Services’ huge replacement proposal. He said “upgrade” doesn’t even begin to describe the scope of the problem.

“Either they knew and weren’t transparent, which is horrible, or they didn’t know and should have, which is only slightly less bad,” he said.

Kingston said an unreliable traffic-signal system could lead to more accidents. For one thing, he said, impatient drivers may choose to find ways around a problem.

“We should obey traffic signals,” he said, “but people have a right to expect that the city will make sure basic infrastructure is taken care of.

“If you sit at a red light long enough, you’ll turn into a libertarian.”

Traffic light repairs by the numbers

0: Number of signal replacement programs the city has ever conducted

1: Traffic signal or other stoplight hardware requiring repairs each day

80: Percentage of Dallas stoplights exceeding their 25-year lifespan

$12.5 million: Cost of replacement of central computer system to be completed in fall 2016

25 years, $250 million: Length of time and cost, so far unfunded, to replace all traffic signal hardware

SOURCES: Dallas Morning News research; Dallas Street Services

©2014 The Dallas Morning News