Abstract Manager

The City of Calgary’s Mobility Operations Centre has embarked on a program to bring 24 hour, 7 days a week active traffic signal management as a key component of its service delivery, leveraging the installation of communication to over 90% of intersections, upgrading to Advanced Traffic Controllers, and its new ATMS software. The MOC has created “incident patterns” at 150 intersections in 2022, based on a methodical review of incident frequency at intersections compared with traffic volume to identify priority locations, with up to eight patterns at each location based on major traffic movements. These patterns allow MOC Technicians to easily call an incident pattern when notified of an incident using 911, PTZ camera, and third-party data such as Waze and INRIX centralized in our new Advanced Traveler Information System portal.

The intent of pre-creating these incident patterns is to allow the technicians to make judgement calls on incident timings without having to ask an Engineer to create timings first; each pattern is set to allow 30-50 seconds more green time in the affected direction without affecting other intersection operation. When an incident is noticed, the appropriate incident pattern can be called within seconds, preventing queues from forming and keeping traffic moving. In 2023, the City is planning to directly integrate the patterns into ATIS so that the available plans are presented to Technicians while they are filling out incident details for sharing to motorists – and eventually the ability to call a pattern directly from the ATIS interface. We are also investigating using machine learning to identify what is “normal” congestion, collected from INRIX and other data sources, and to flag unusual congestion quickly – calling incident patterns without human intervention. Finally, the City is developing a model to quantify the benefit of these incident patterns to citizens based on the duration, number of lanes closed, and traffic volume of the affected intersection; allowing the MOC to communicate the value of our efforts in tons of carbon dioxide saved, and the dollar value in travel time saved.