Winter Park jumps on board traffic technology initiative

Winter Park doesn’t want you sitting around in traffic.

The Winter Park City Commission passed a resolution during its meeting last Monday in support of a new traffic initiative by U.S. Rep. John Mica, who hopes to bring cutting-edge traffic technology to major arteries throughout Central Florida, including Fairbanks Avenue, Lee Road and U.S. Highway 17-92.

Winter Park Traffic Manager Butch Margraf said that Mica’s initiative aims to acquire an intelligent transportation system (ITS) that counts cars and uses that data to modify traffic light timers in real time.

Margraf explained that many signals throughout the city shift their timing automatically during peak hours in the morning, noon and afternoon, making lights either faster or slower to help ease the flow of traffic. The timing light cycles however, set in place by FDOT, don’t adapt to changes on a given day due to accidents or construction.

Using ITS would allow intersections to count the cars going through an intersection and time the lights accordingly.

“That’s extremely helpful,” Margraf said.

“What makes it work is you have to have good technology in the field that counts the cars. You’ve heard of ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ If you don’t have good data going in then you’re not going to pick the past plan for the moment.”

Margraf said that the city often feels the brunt of heavy traffic along streets like Fairbanks Avenue.

“If you were travelling through the city eastbound in the afternoon say at 3:30 or 4 o’clock, it would start getting highly congested when you start to get on the east side of our city,” he said. “There’s some streets over there like Cortland Avenue and Mizell Avenue where, if it gets backed up, people peel off and cut through the neighborhood.”

Mica told the Orlando Sentinel this week that his initiative has already received written support from Seminole County, Winter Springs and Apopka, adding that he needs more than a dozen local governments to jump on board to help him compete for federal funding.

But Winter Park isn’t waiting around to see what happens next. After a recent meeting between the city and FDOT, similar technology is already being installed along U.S. Highway 17-92, using what the city calls the “concierge program.” The technology is able to count cars and pick from one of 8 to 10 pre-set traffic light cycles to accommodate the traffic.

“I don’t believe it’s been implemented yet, but we’re on the threshold of it coming online,” Margraf said.

City Commissioner Greg Seidel has also been developing a traffic model with city staff that could tell how much traffic will result from a potential development project.

Seidel told the Observer last year that the concept is still being crafted, but compared it to what he does at The Balmoral Group, an engineering design firm with an expertise in economics, environmental analysis and GIS capabilities. Seidel said his firm has every farm in Florida mapped out for its estimated water use so that the farmers can better understand and monitor their water consumption.

Winter Park can take the same approach with measuring traffic caused by a new development, Seidel said.

“We have development outside of the city that we can’t do anything about,” Seidel said. “With this model that I’m talking about, those are your boundary conditions for the model. Only so many cars can come down Aloma at 436.”

“We can insert the development, the traffic it’s going to generate and see if it causes intersections to fail or things to function worse.”

City Commissioner Sarah Sprinkel said last Monday that the city should do whatever it can to help Seidel and fix the city’s traffic problems.

“When people complain, they talk about traffic,” she said. “I think it’s something that we need to address sooner rather then later.”