Senate Bill 315 is one of the bills on its way to the governor. Authored by Senator Ford, it requires the Department of Transportation to study “intelligent transportation systems” which it defines as “a combination of information, control, and electronic technologies used to enhance the safety, maintenance, fuel efficiency, traffic flow, and ease of use of highways.” The term includes advanced traveler information systems; advance traffic management systems; and incident management systems.
What I’d like would be a system of cameras and monitors. The cameras would turn on at the point(s) at which traffic slows to a crawl and transmit the images all along the highway where traffic is stopped. I really hate it when I wait in a traffic jam for an hour and then, when it lets up, there is no apparent reason.
[tags]SB315-2007, transportation[/tags]
Lack of time prevents from reading the bill, but it might be of interest that the US DOT designated the Gary-Chicago-Milwaukee Corridor as one of the four highest priority Intelligent Transportation System corridors in the Country in 1996. Truck traffic, mixed with heavy commuter along the primary I-80/90/94 interstates, have long been known to be a major congestion problem. The Mississippi Valley Freight Corridors Coalition has been trying to expand the GCM corridor project to a broader regional scale. Needless to say this program would be of great benefit to northwest Indiana, which leaves me wondering why we are just now to begin “studying” it.