Northern Texas to Implement Freight Priority Program
It is basic physics that it takes more fuel to accelerate an 80,000 truck than a sedan. With this logic in mind, the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) is hoping to use technology to make the streets of the Dallas-Fort Worth area more accessible to truckers by making it easier for them to navigate city streets..
Details
The Lone Star state is no stranger to traffic congestion. With that in mind, NCTCOG is hoping to use a system of cameras and computers to detect when Class 8 trucks are on the road, and change traffic light wait times on the fly to compensate. They hope that by doing this, it will not only save truckers time and money, but also reduce emissions. The system is known as Freight Priority, and will last five years.
For the project, they hired a company called Kimley-Horn, of which project manager Kent Kacir says, “Once we know that a truck is within a particular area of an intersection that we have granted rights to control, then our signal goes down from the cloud to the local agency’s traffic signal to extend that phase an additional four or five seconds.”
Kimley-Horn and NCTCOG are currently planning to implement the system across 500 different intersections. NCTCOG also predicts that the implementation of Freight Priority will save 16,000 hours of drive time for truckers, as well as 325 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
Conclusion
With Texas having some of the worst traffic conditions in the nation, it is nice to see some local governments do something about it while keeping truckers in mind. After all, while most people drive to and from work every day, for truckers driving is work, and a driver can often expect to put in 400 miles in a single day minimum. We hope that other municipalities (and perhaps state governments) implement a similar system to help keep America’s freight rolling along.
The last thing we would like to mention is the implication this system could have on the future of autonomous trucking. After all, if one of the greatest difficulties of getting a self-driving truck to work is getting them to safely pass traffic lights, making lights green longer for them would certainly help. The system would still need more fine-tuning for this, however, as trucks traveling in different directions will invariably come to an intersection at the same time.
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