New cameras offer more help for your commute

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Ten new traffic cameras were turned on Wednesday in Snohomish County, and one more will crank into service soon.

The cameras, used to help the traveling public avoid road tie-ups, are part of a gradual expansion of traffic congestion coverage in the county, said Jamie Holter, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation.

“We see a huge need in Snohomish County,” Holter said.

She said population growth is fueling the need for more coverage, pointing out that Snohomish County got 11 of 17 new traffic cameras that the state just finished installing.

The new cameras went up in locations where the state had little or no real-time traffic information, especially on Highway 532, which got five cameras in the Stanwood area.

It’s been tough for the state to provide good traffic information from the Stanwood-Camano Island area, which involves Snohomish and Island counties, and ties into Skagit County.

“We certainly don’t like to give out false information, or go by word of mouth,” Holter said. “People need to know what’s going on.”

One new traffic camera in Stanwood is not working properly, but it should be functioning within a week or so, Holter said. One of the five Highway 532 cameras is on Camano Island.

Monroe has four new cameras on U.S. 2, there’s a new one at Highway 522 and Fales-Echo Lake Road and at 172nd Street NE at I-5 in Smokey Point.

Unlike more powerful cameras along metropolitan sections of I-5 and I-405, most of the new cameras can’t film traffic, they can’t pan left or right or zoom in on a troublesome spot, said Quang Nguyen, a traffic engineer for the state.

Instead, the new cameras take a picture of traffic at key intersections about once every five minutes, Nguyen said. He said there are similar cameras in place all over Snohomish County.

He said cameras installed on Highway 532 can film traffic, but he said that function is not working well and likely will be turned off.

I-5 up to the Boeing Freeway exit and I-405 are wired into a fiber optic network that allows for the state to record real-time video from its network of cameras, he said.

Despite being a junior version, the new Snohomish County cameras still will be quite helpful to travelers as well as to emergency responders, Holter said. She also said that traffic reporters also use the cameras to make their traffic reports.

By the end of summer, a second wave of traffic cameras will come to Snohomish County.

The state is installing 16 traffic cameras on I-5 from the Boeing Freeway to the Snohomish River as part of an ongoing widening project, said Ryan Bianchi, a DOT spokesman.

The work doesn’t have to finish until 2008, but project managers believe they will be able to turn on the cameras by the end of summer, Bianchi said.

When the cameras go live, so will 450 traffic loops. These are car-counting devices imbedded in freeway pavement that count traffic.

It’s those loops that the state uses to generate its traffic flow maps and to estimate travel times between cities. Loops currently extend north as far as the Boeing Freeway.