Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Smart Corridor spells help for Highway 17 commuters

By Jeff Kearns

As the boom in Silicon Valley echoes down the crammed freeways, regional transportation planners are taking a new look at traffic patterns and seeking high-tech solutions. Los Gatos will soon sign on to participate with other state and local agencies in the Silicon Valley Smart Corridor program, a traffic management system that uses networked equipment to help ease the backup throughout the Highway 17/880 corridor.

The corridor concept is a collaborative effort of Caltrans, the Valley Transportation Authority, the California Highway Patrol and county officials to work alongside the cities of San Jose, Santa Clara, Campbell, Milpitas and Los Gatos to create a communications network that will collect and disperse traffic information in real time.

The Town Council recently authorized Town Manager David Knapp to sign a cooperation agreement with the agencies involved with SVSC. The town's expense should be about $200 a month for a leased phone line to connect intelligent traffic signals.

Road sensors and closed-circuit cameras will eventually be connected to a communications room linked to changeable traffic signs, coordinated traffic signals, and TravInfo, a regional network that serves radio and television, as well as the Web. Staff at San Jose's Signal Central will monitor traffic so that signs will change to route traffic around accidents, and signal lights will be able to accommodate heavy traffic.

Much of the network will be linked with dedicated phone lines and fiberoptic cables, which are being installed to handle the future demands of bandwidth-hungry video feeds.

Already one of the most advanced cities in the state in terms of traffic management, San Jose is the lead agency working on the SVSC project, which concentrates on the 15-mile stretch of highway between Milpitas and Los Gatos.

The key to the concept is the "smart" aspect. With the system, planners say they are not trying to move more people--or more cars--through the area but to put existing resources to better use, instead of dealing with the tremendous expense and effort involved in building more freeways.

Plans also include "smart parks," specially designed junctions of freeways and mass transit systems. These are intended to give commuters a place to wait for their rides that would also serve food and provide other services, like dry-cleaning.

The cost for the first phases of the project will be about $20 million, which will include the communications lines, software upgrades, "smart" traffic signals, changeable message signs on freeways and closed-circuit television monitoring. Most funding comes from state and federal sources.

Although money for projects like SVSC is in jeopardy, with recent cuts in federal allocations and a shortfall of gas-tax money, coming years may bring new sources of revenue. A survey recently showed many voters are willing to support a regional gas tax increase that may go on the ballot in 2000 and that could raise as much as $200 million for Bay Area projects.

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