When I was a teen, I visited the City of Saskatoon’s traffic operations centre. Admittedly, my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I recall a centralized control board visualizing the status of most of the traffic signals in the city. I also recall some complaint about “fault” conditions and “communication issues” with this centralized system. While impressive at the time, transportation technology has come a long way since the mid-1990s.
For the past decade, I have worked as a transportation engineer and conducted both planning and operational analyses. One of the biggest challenges to performing this type of work is acquiring relevant and sufficient field data – household activity surveys, vehicle turning movement counts, travel time surveys, etc. can become costly endeavours in many circumstances. Continue reading
