Day 31
Seminar/Workshop
Today I attended a workshop on Adaptive Signal Control – one of the technology innovations in the Every Day Counts initiative. The class was given by FHWA, and the city of Bolingbrook hosted the site. There were only about 20 people there: 3 from municipalities, 2 consultants, 4 from counties and personnel from 3 IDOT districts. I took a lot of notes and had planned on writing something up tonight on it. But at the end, I got the impression they really weren't interested in getting the word out about the initiative – instead they were asking those who attended to use the material they provided to produce a report analyzing traffic signal systems in their own communities. Most of the ones in Geneva are managed by IDOT or KDOT (Kane County DOT) and fortunately both were represented at the meeting. I talked to each agency about analyzing the routes through our community, but I think they haven't yet decided if that is something they will definitely do. Although we are going to begin the Phase 2 design portion of one IDOT's routes, and I don't see how we cannot perform this analysis to address the signals and traffic flow.
It's unfortunate too that I can't share with you right now the best part of the workshop – the guidance document they prepared to help agencies analyze their systems. But they said it will be available online in a week or so. After it gets posted, I will upload it to Scribd so I can create an embed and put it here on the site so you can see it – they have done an amazing job with this. By that time, I should have a write-up of the workshop done.
