Redlight system ‘5 months behind’
With Town traffic congestion something most Farragut citizens must tackle, it was a local businesswoman and chair of Shop Farragut/Farragut Business Alliance asking a key question concerning technology originally scheduled to be completed earlier this fall, which would better time traffic light changes and help alleviate congestion.
“What’s going on with the lights, the traffic and the craziness?” Candace Viox, owner of Water into Wine bistro and lounge, asked Town administrator David Smoak during the SF/FBA meeting in Farragut Community Center Wednesday morning, Dec. 11.
“I see it at (North) Campbell Station (Road) on Grigsby Chapel (Road), especially at school time. And then everybody’s making a left (from Grigsby to North Campbell) trying to get on the freeway, and it backs all the way up. And I get to hear about it all the time,” she added.
“So the contractor is five months behind schedule,” Smoak answered. “We are still waiting on them to finish their main work to get done. When they finish, then we will have a timing plan, all these other new things that are going to come with that we’ll be able to put in place. And then we’ll actually have access to it from a staff point to where we can make adjustments as we need to.
“So all that’s still not in place,” he added. “... And the little sensors that we have, they try to find the cars as they’re pulling up, things like that. Some of those are working, some of them aren’t. Those are all things that, if they go out, can back up traffic very quickly and make things a mess. And they’re still working through that.
“It’s basically a 60-day window for us to continue monitoring. But we really are trying to make sure everything is working right, and we’re still not there yet.”
Specifically, “I think all the stuff is in the ground; it’s now equipment,” Smoak said. “That’s really what they’re working on, is equipment and fine-tuning the equipment.
“... We have video monitoring now that we can do on the intersections, and we get a lot of people to say, ‘you all are only letting two or three cars through,’” he added.
“It’s a 12-second light. So if people pay attention instead of being distracted, you can get five or six or seven cars, even, through a 12-second light. And so when people are distracted, that causes you to get two or three, maybe four cars.”
Reaching out for more help, “We’ve hired another contractor engineering firm to come in and give us another set of timing plans,” Smoak said. “So we’re going to work off the first one we have, and then we’re going to work off another one, and we’re going to see which one works best.
“So this is going to be, I would say, two or three months of just changing timing patterns as we get into it to see what’s the most efficient plan for us,” he added.
