Big brother is watching you on the freeway!!!!

ADOT finishes $2.1 million upgrade to camera system

ADOT and the Arizona Highway Patrol or Arizona Department of Public Safety DPS is constantly spying on you as you cruise down the Arizona Freeways!!!

  Remember Big brother is watching you on the freeway!!!! Every inch that you drive on the Arizona Freeways you are being spied on by the folks at ADOT and the DPS or the Arizona Department of Transportation and the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

Source

ADOT finishes $2.1 million upgrade to camera system

By Sean Holstege The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Feb 20, 2013 10:59 PM

Maybe you’re one of those savvy commuters who checks out road conditions before getting behind the wheel.

If so, you’ve probably discovered the live feeds relayed from the 180 traffic cameras that the Arizona Department of Transportation has scattered around the Valley’s freeways. And you may have noticed that dozens of them didn’t work.

Until this week.

ADOT has announced that it has finished a $2.1 million upgrade of the system. It replaced cable with fiber-optic lines, so the cameras now show fresh images every 10 seconds rather than every 5 minutes. The work was one reason for the darkened cameras.

But not the only one. Another was an ongoing problem: copper thieves.

The camera network does not use copper wire, according to ADOT, but copper thieves sometimes also cut the fiber-optic cable used for the cameras and other freeway-management-system equipment, including overhead message boards.

ADOT estimates that thieves have cost taxpayers almost $100,000 in repairs over the past three years. Thieves are to blame for an Interstate 17 camera going down near Seventh Street.

Rodents also got the ADOT finger of blame for a camera malfunction on Loop 101. One creature got inside the wiring cabinet and started chewing through the cable, ADOT spokesman Doug Nintzel said. There was no word on whether the rodent fared better than the camera.

Loss of camera signals is not just an inconvenience to motorists and a cost to the state.

Authorities use the information to post the most accurate travel times on the changeable signs above some freeways and to deploy Highway Patrol cars or tow trucks. They also use images to manage incidents and deploy first responders.

They also watch a bank of video screens at the Traffic Operations Center. On the old, so-called video wall, officials used to monitor 32 traffic images at a time. With the federally funded upgrade, they can now scan up to 160 images simultaneously. Or they can focus on one, if there is a particularly bad incident, like the overturned truck that spilled coffee creamer all over Interstate 10 last Wednesday.

The Traffic Operations Center was built more than 20 years ago. The first camera was installed over I-10 in 1990.

“Now, the system will help give users a much better, accurate story,” said Darrell Bingham, ADOT’s project manager on the upgrade. “The benefit to drivers will be more information when they need it the most to avoid congestion and make informed decisions during their commute.”

Last year, almost 9.4million visitors went to ADOT’s traffic site at az511.gov to check the cameras. That’s nearly 26,000 visits a day from people who rely on the cameras to plan their trips. Travelers can get up-to-the-minute travel times, road conditions and alerts via the web or by calling the toll-free 511 number. The online service gives the added benefit of live traffic footage.

That’s the theory. In practice, there are still a few glitches.

A quick check Friday showed that a dozen cameras were still down. Every freeway except Arizona 143 near Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport was affected.

Some camera feeds posted “No Image Available,” like one on I-10 in the Deck Park Tunnel. By midafternoon, it was working properly. Some, such as an Arizona 51 image from south of Greenway Road, showed what appeared to be branches of a tree. Others showed images of a ditch.

No system is perfect, but the Valley’s freeway cameras are much more reliable than they were just two weeks ago.

 

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