Like the crawl of vehicles during rush hours, an automated traffic signal system meant to create a smoother flow of traffic along Maumelle Boulevard in Maumelle and North Little Rock is moving forward slowly.
Bids on the project, in the works since 2013, are to go out next month, Maumelle Mayor Mike Watson announced last week. However, implementation of the system isn't likely to happen until late 2016, North Little Rock Chief City Engineer Chris Wilbourn said.
The adaptive traffic signal control system will enable traffic lights to assess traffic in real time and "talk" to each other to synchronize themselves to keep traffic flowing efficiently. Current traffic signals are preset and cannot adjust to changes in traffic volume.
Watson has pushed for the project since 2013 to help ease increasing traffic congestion along Maumelle Boulevard, the only road in and out of the city of more than 17,000 residents until a planned interchange along Interstate 40 can be built.
The Maumelle Boulevard (Arkansas 100) project is one of four adaptive signal control projects in central Arkansas to benefit from about $4 million in federal grant funds awarded last year by Metroplan, central Arkansas' long-range transportation planning agency. The others are in Little Rock, Benton and Conway.
The Maumelle Boulevard project will cover 13 traffic signals through three jurisdictions: Maumelle, North Little Rock and Pulaski County. The affected signals -- mainly along Maumelle Boulevard -- reach from the traffic light at the NorthShore Business Park entrance off Crystal Hill Road to the I-40 interchange off Arkansas 365. Six of the traffic lights are within Maumelle, five are in North Little Rock and two are in the county.
"The reason the Maumelle Boulevard system is a little bit further behind is because you have four different entities involved: North Little Rock, Maumelle, the county, and it's also a state highway," Metroplan Executive Director Jim McKenzie said. "So they had to negotiate amongst themselves who was going to be the one in charge of maintaining the whole thing."
The Maumelle City Council approved a resolution last week to allow North Little Rock to manage and maintain the entire system. North Little Rock has a Traffic Services Department while Maumelle doesn't. County Judge Barry Hyde and the North Little Rock City Council also must sign off on the agreement.
"The Federal Highway Administration requires having a primary control center," Watson explained to City Council members at the meeting last Monday night. "We actually have to contract out our maintenance [on Maumelle traffic signals] anyway.
"Hopefully, this will be deployed sometime early next year," Watson said.
In an interview late in the week, Wilbourn gave a more conservative time frame for the complex system to be up and running.
"Probably, at best, I would say sometime toward the end of next year," Wilbourn said. "This will be like putting in a state-of-the-art-type system. They will be tying into fiber-optic lines for communication and coordination between the signals. It's a major project."
Maumelle aldermen approved the agreement in a 7-1 vote, but only after discussing concerns of handing over control of traffic signals inside Maumelle to a neighboring city. Alderman Steve Mosley voted against the legislation because "if we're not happy with how it's going," he said, there is no provision to cancel the agreement.
Wilbourn said in his later interview that there wasn't really any choice but to have such an agreement.
"We would not get the funding for it unless there was one entity overseeing it," Wilbourn said of the project.
Maumelle would still be responsible for paying for any repair of traffic signals within its city limits, but that cost isn't yet known, Wilbourn said.
"Later on we'll have to have an agreement for pricing and all that," he said. "Basically, if we're replacing a traffic controller on a Maumelle signal, we'll do the work, but they'll pay for the controller. It's going to be a shared thing."
Maumelle Boulevard's traffic problems are complicated by it being parallel to I-40 and also connecting with Interstate 430. Recent construction on I-40 and at the I-40/I-430 interchange, as well as any accident on I-40 that slows traffic, can shift hundreds of vehicles to Maumelle Boulevard, adding to its congestion.
"The boulevard is pretty outrageously crowded," McKenzie said, adding that the original plans for Maumelle weren't meant to create a commuter suburb.
Maumelle was to have its own "significant job base, so they wouldn't have all that commuting," McKenzie said. "People would have been working in town. But it didn't turn out that way."
Metro on 08/10/2015