Revolutionizing Traffic Control in Edmonton

Edmonton, Alberta, faces transportation problems familiar to most large cities: growing population, suburban sprawl and road congestion. Most people still drive to work – one person to a vehicle. Bus ridership has increased recently – over the past five years, Edmonton Transit System (ETS) ridership has grown faster than the city’s population – up 14 per cent compared with a population growth of 8 per cent but it is still only a small portion of daily commuters.

Traffic Signal Priority (TSP) has been proven in numerous instances to reduce delays, contributing to faster travel and reduced operating costs per passenger. It also helps promote greater use of public transit. With those goals in mind, the ETS recently commissioned a trial project for traffic signal priority along one of its busiest commuter corridors. ETS chose TransPOD™ (Transit Priority on Demand), developed by Novax Industries of New Westminster, BC, because it meets or exceeds all ETS requirements, including a requirement to deploy municipal Wi-Fi. For this TSP installation, Novax deployed a Tropos® MetroMesh™ network to provide the communications layer for different components of the system.

TransPOD’s management interface (NEMS™, for Novax Elements Management Server) gives detailed, real-time views of how the system and buses are operating, including maps that update bus locations second by second, making it possible to predict bus arrival times at different stops and to track buses that are running behind or ahead of schedule. If desired, authorized transit managers can alter some priority parameters – increasing or decreasing the amount of time it will hold a green light, for example, to bring vehicles back on schedule.

TransPOD is one of several ITS applications Novax has developed for municipal wireless networks. Besides being able to operate without a direct line of sight to an intersection (as is required by competing infrared technologies), TransPOD also opens the door to enhanced, revenue-generating commuter services, including:

As currently installed in Edmonton, TransPOD consists of:

The PRG and PRS units communicate through the Wi-Fi network, which also relays logs and other information from the units through three gateway clusters to the city's Traffic Management Centre, where they can be viewed and acted upon through the Novax Elements Management System (NEMS), which gives transit managers the ability to see how their buses are operating and modify their system as needed to increase efficiency.

TheTransPOD system in Edmonton has operated with better than 90% up-time since it was installed last fall. Additional fine-tuning should increase up-time to over 99%. Tests this summer will gather first-hand information on how TransPOD reduces delays and provide insights for optimizing the system.

The ETS is already enhancing TransPOD by adding black box data collection, and plans to expand Traffic Signal Priority to other transit corridors.