Develop a Plan to Deploy an ITS Solution to Measure Volume and Crossing Times of Passenger Vehicles at the Bridge of the Americas
Author(s):
D.R. Middleton, L. Ruback, R. Rajbhandari
Publication Date:
October 2014
Abstract:
MIllions of commuters cross the U.S.-Mexico border daily because of work, business, and social activities. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 2008 at the El Paso region, the ports of entry (POE) had around 13 million passenger vehicles crossing into the United States, with the morning crossing time of northbound passenger vehicles measured in hours during peak periods and, until recently, that of southbound vehicles measured in minutes. The crossing time for the latter will soon change as the Mexican government starts a program that would read license plates of individual vehicles and perform background checks on vehicles and owners coming to Mexico from the United States. In anticipation of these changes, the Texas Department of Transportation, the City of El Paso, and the El Paso Metropolitan Planning Organization are developing plans to increase the capacity of roadway segments entering Mexico, mainly to store queued vehicles.
Understanding vehicle flow between these two countries is crucial for many reasons, but transportation agencies in the region have not installed data collection systems to obtain data that measure the volume and crossing times of vehicles to and from the United States and Mexico.
TTI proposed a system to measure crossing times and the volume of passenger vehicles at the Bridge of the Americas (BOTA), with a separate setup for measuring crossing times and volume of both northbound and southbound vehicles. This proposed system uses a Bluetooth signal identification technique to determine crossing times and newer vehicle detection technologies to measure the volume of passenger vehicles. Also, the proposed system will deploy several Bluetooth signal readers around the BOTA and a series of either laser or microwave detectors to measure passenger vehicle volume. Since the Bluetooth readers and vehicle detectors operate independently, a centralized data processing system is needed to communicate with these field devices. The researchers determined cost estimates to install, operate, and maintain this system for deployment at the BOTA.
Report Number:
1860054-1
Electronic Link(s):
Document/Product
http://tti.tamu.edu/documents/1860054-1.pdf
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