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Smart Highway Aims to Cut I-80 Congestion in East Bay

The I-80 Smart Corridor project will feature 133 large high-tech signs, and a system that will gather information from networks of sensors and cameras on the freeway, major side streets and ramps.

The Bay Area’s next big highway project promises to cut congestion and reduce accidents in the East Bay on westbound Interstate 80, which consistently ranks as the region’s lousiest commute – and it’s due to be finished early next year.

 
So why haven’t you seen bulldozers, dump trucks and hordes of workers in neon vests and hardhats, grading and paving new lanes? Because the I-80 project isn’t about building a bigger freeway but installing a slew of signs and technology that work together to improve traffic flow.
 
The most noticeable evidence of the project’s progress will appear soon, possibly this week. Working at night, crews will install 11 huge gantries – metal sign frames – that stretch across all westbound lanes of the freeway in the most consistently congested and collision-ridden stretch, from Richmond to Emeryville.
 
Those gantries will hold an array of signs giving drivers information to help them steer clear of accidents, debris and blocked lanes. It will even let them know if it would be faster to take public transit. More signs will be scattered along the rest of the 19.5-mile stretch of the project between the Carquinez Bridge in Crockett and the Bay Bridge.
 
“This really is the wave of the future,” said Ivy Morrison, the project spokeswoman for Caltrans. “We’re not building or expanding more highways. What we are building is smarter roads, using technology to maximize use.”
 

On and off freeway

 
When it’s done in 2015, the I-80 Smart Corridor project will feature 133 large high-tech signs, but it’s about much more than signs. The system will gather information from networks of sensors and cameras on the freeway, major side streets and ramps.
 
That data, with the help of humans in the Caltrans Traffic Management Center in Oakland, will be used to meter traffic at all 44 on-ramps along the corridor, adjust the signs along I-80 and control traffic signals on nearby arterial streets to help combat congestion there, and steer it back toward the freeway.
 
The main goal, Morrison said, is to prevent accidents, which clog the freeway and often lead to not only congestion but more accidents and lengthy delays that can turn a difficult commute into a hellish slog.
 
“When there’s an accident on the freeway, traffic backs up,” Morrison said. “The challenge now is that motorists are not armed with information. They may know something has happened ahead but don’t know how to prepare for it. They don’t know what lanes to use – or even to slow down.”
 

Incident management

 
The centerpiece of the $80 million project, funded with federal money and state, regional and local sales tax revenue, is the incident management system, an engineering term for the gallery of signs and array of cameras that will enable controllers in the traffic center to steer drivers around closed lanes.
 
When they become aware of an incident, the nine operators in the 24-hour Traffic Management Center – a huge room that looks like NASA’s Mission Control – will be able to post information on electronic signs, adjust advisory speed-limit signs to slow traffic and activate lane-use signs to show motorists which lanes to avoid and which to use.
 
On San Pablo Avenue, a state highway that parallels I-80 and becomes a popular alternate route when I-80 backs up – which is often – the operators will be able to speed up or slow down traffic signals to help keep traffic flowing. There are also signals to give transit buses priority. “Trailblazer” signs at major arterial streets that connect San Pablo to the freeway will direct drivers back to the freeway with the message “To I-80″ and an arrow pointing the way.
 
“Right now, they just get off and stay off,” Morrison said. “That clogs the streets and people’s neighborhoods. We’ll tell them when to get back on” I-80.
 

Target early next year

 
The project will also feature ramp metering, which is designed to keep traffic on the freeway moving while preventing it from backing up onto local streets, as well as improved traffic and transit information that can be displayed on the freeway to let drivers know when they’d be better off to park their cars and take BART. All pieces of the system are designed to work together.
 
Most of the signs, including all 11 gantries, will be displayed in the westbound lanes because that’s where traffic is most congested and where most of the 2,000 accidents occur each year.
 
Construction of the system started in 2012, but much of it involved installing fiber-optic cables, working on traffic signals, manufacturing signs and creating computer applications. Work on San Pablo Avenue has been completed, though the trailblazer signs are covered, and the large freeway signs have all been manufactured and are being tested in a San Leandro warehouse.
 
Over the next few months the signs will be installed, the systems will be tied together and everything will be tested again. And sometime in the first three months of 2015 the Bay Area should have its first “smart” highway, which will also be California’s first, Morrison said. But it probably won’t be the last.
 
“This technology will be coming to other congested corridors in the Bay Area,” she said.
 
©2014 the San Francisco Chronicle