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through Maricopa County, Arizona's SMARTDrive Program: A Look at the Anthem Connected Vehicle Test Bed
Maricopa County, Arizona, USA is the fourth most populous and fastest growing county in the United States. It is comprised of 25 cities and towns and is built upon an extensive regional transportation network of freeways and arterial roads that serve as the backbone for connectivity for the Phoenix, AZ metro area. Growth is not a new concept to Maricopa County, and the Maricopa County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) has been developing solutions to improve traffi c management in the region for more than 20 years.
One of MCDOT's key strategies to achieving seamless transportation was to implement the SMART (Systematically Managed Arterials) corridor program. This program promotes improved safety and mobility on the arterial corridors through efficient traffic signal operations on the region's approximately 3,500 traffic signals. Through regional funding and collaboration through AZTech, a regional traffic management partnership jointly led by the Maricopa County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) and the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT), several regional corridors were deployed with advanced traffic controllers, a fiber communications backbone, and integrated signal timing strategies. As a result, the SMART corridors, such as Bell Road, saw a reduction in travel time by 27 percent, although the average daily traffic (ADT) more than doubled. The next advancement on Bell Road is deployment of adaptive signal control technology (ASCT) on 50 traffic signals. The Bell Road system is planned to be fully implemented by early 2018.
The advent of connected vehicle technology has provided MCDOT the opportunity to develop next generation intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to achieve a new level of seamless transportation systems. MCDOT, ADOT, and the University of Arizona have formed the Arizona Connected Vehicle Coalition to develop, deploy, and test applications that will further advance the traffic signal safety and provide efficient mobility in a multimodal environment. Through this partnership, the MCDOT SMARTDrive Program™ was launched. Originally created to improve emergency responder safety and mobility at intersections, the MCDOT SMARTDrive Program allows for two-way communication between vehicles and roadway infrastructure by using dedicated short range communications (DSRC), a component of the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) multimodal intelligent traffic signal systems (MMITSS). MMITSS prioritizes traffic flow and pedestrian...