Valdosta's City Council approved purchasing 128 units and associated equipment for $402,129 at a meeting Thursday. The units will update the current traffic system that is about 10 years old, said Larry Ogden, city traffic manager.
Ogden said the system will make it easier for fire trucks to respond inside the city. The trucks will carry devices that will communicate with traffic lights and make sure the trucks don’t hit red lights in heavily congested areas of town.
“The current system we have is supposed to do it but it doesn’t work well,” Ogden said. “The TIMMs units will increase response time.”
He also said the city won’t have to buy expensive servers or use fiber-optic cables. At the traffic management center, there are multiple servers running the current system that can cost up to $25,000. The servers take a lot of maintenance and often need to be replaced, he said.
With the TIMMs units, everything is done through the cloud, Ogden said. Not only does this save money spent on servers and fiber optics, it also makes it easier for technicians to monitor, adjust settings and determine failures at any intersection 24 hours a day from anywhere.
“It makes our job a whole lot easier,” Ogden said. “We’ve had times where people call us at three in the morning, and we’ve had to drive to the TMC to see what was going on, and usually it’s nothing.”
According to city documents, the upgrade has been discussed for several years.
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