Empowering Cities to Protect their Most Vulnerable Road Users with Miovision TrafficLink

About

The City of Quincy’s traffic division provides the city with a safe and effective transportation network. The division is responsible for designing, installing, and operating all traffic signals. The City of Quincy uses engineering techniques to achieve roadway users' safe and efficient movement, focusing mainly on safe and efficient traffic flow. The City also works to review significant development proposals, evaluate traffic impacts, and determine the appropriate mitigation measures, if necessary, and with MassDOT and the MBTA on state projects happening within the City.

Challenge

Quincy Avenue, a central entrance route serving the city of Quincy, Massachusetts, was known for being a high-speed thoroughfare. Providing the city with more than 25 000 vehicles a day along a three-mile long corridor, the roadway experiences heavy traffic and high numbers of speeding vehicles. The city had a known safety issue in the corridor. Identifying an appropriate solution would improve safety and maintain an acceptable level of service for vehicles. The city needed council approval and funding to undertake projects to keep the city’s most vulnerable road users safe. 

Solution

Using Miovision’s Trafficlink solutions, the City of Quincy could extract historical data and leverage the information to help make informed decisions for the desired project. The City of Quincy had already installed Miovision technology along the corridor. With the help of Miovision Customer Support and traffic specialists, the city was instructed on how to take advantage of and utilize the data they already had at their disposal. Having Miovision TrafficLink deployments at the beginning and end of the corridor, traffic engineers had high confidence in traffic data and scenarios and could run Synchro analysis to determine the project's impact.

“With Miovision's analytic tools at our disposal, we could forgo hiring a consultant's expensive and time-consuming process. The information provided by Miovision's platform allowed us to leverage internal resources to quickly identify and implement a public safety improvement, all while saving valuable taxpayer dollars.”  
- Edward Grennon, Director TPAL, City of Quincy

Results

Using Miovision TrafficLink solutions and the historical data from these deployments, the city of Quincy, Mass, bypassed hiring a third-party consulting firm to run the analyses required to pitch the project to the city council, which could have cost upwards of $25 000 in fees. These analyses were done in-house, quickly and cost-effectively, and the pitch was successful. This result allowed the city to move forward independently and reduce the cross-section of the roadway by 11ft, or an entire lane, transforming the cross-section to one lane in each direction, with a dedicated turn lane and a bike lane on each side. This change gave 5ft on each side of the road back as a bike lane for cyclists and pedestrians. The situation is now fundamentally safer, with fatalities at the significant conflict point eradicated and speeds reduced.

“Following the implementation of the project, we were able to utilize the diagnostic tools that Miovision has available to review and compare travel time data before and after project implementation, allowing us to understand impacts the project had on that section of roadway.”
- Allison Ruel, P.E., Traffic Engineer, City of Quincy

Conclusion

The City of Quincy utilized Miovision solutions to achieve these project goals:

• Safety measures implemented for vulnerable road users

• Reduced speeds along the corridor

• Council approval and funding

• Expedited project planning and execution

Built on AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides Miovision’s software platform with a reliable, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure platform.  AWS provides data storage through AWS RDS and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), at the edge data collection using AWS IoT Core, data streaming using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), container orchestration using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and computational resources using Amazon EC2. Miovision trusts AWS with our data because AWS boasts the most stringent security and compliance standards.