July 18, 2012

Busy Timaru roadways to get first permanent traffic counters

A traffic monitoring first is coming to Timaru early next week with the installation of permanent traffic counters on two of the city’s busiest roads.

The use of temporary counters has been widespread, but permanent traffic counters to be installed on Church Street, just west of the State Highway One overbridge, and on Wai-iti Road east of the Selwyn Street intersection, are a first for the council.

They will provide an important new phase in road engineering data, the Timaru District Council says.

The counters, magnetic strips embedded just beneath the surface of the road seal on both sides of the road and crossways to the traffic flow, act in the same way as traffic signal detectors. Each side has two strips known as loop sensors in parallel to measure the time it takes between the activation of each, thus providing a vehicle speed calibration and also detecting the type of vehicle such as cars, trucks and buses. There is also no noise from vehicles travelling over these counters, unlike the rubber tube ones.

Council land transport manager Andrew Dixon said the strips would be installed at both sites simultaneously during the week from Monday (eds: from Monday July 23) and there would be some traffic disruption while the work proceeded over the rest of the week.

“Traffic will be inconvenienced only with flows reduced to one lane for part of a day, not full road closures,” he said.

“We just want to get a message out to road users to give them an opportunity to plan alternative routes to avoid delay.”

Mr Dixon said traffic counts were important to ensure future traffic demands were met.

“Traffic volume also affects the road surface and pavement. Accurate traffic counts allow us to predict the life of the road and plan for maintenance and renewal in a timely and cost-effective manner,” he said.

“Traffic counts also record the type of vehicles and the speed, which is also important information in the management of the road,” Mr Dixon said.

The state highway network has various permanent counters throughout the district and the council operates 10 other traffic counting units (with rubber tubes) which were set up at 10 different locations throughout the district on a weekly basis, he said.

“But traffic on a road varies over the year so the weekly ‘snap shots’ don’t always give a true picture. These permanent ones will allow us to obtain true annual traffic data at a reduced cost with no more need to place and retrieve the rubber tube counters at these locations a number of times each year.”

ENDS

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