(TNS) — A community of visitors indicators linked by a citywide fiber-optic system that may be calibrated in actual time to easy visitors movement is one step nearer now that town’s bid for a $6.6 million state grant has been given the inexperienced gentle.
“[T]his funding will permit us to have a dependable and strong communications spine to observe and management all visitors indicators within the metropolis of Danbury,” Mayor Dean Esposito mentioned in an announcement. The fiber optic system, he mentioned, “will allow town to implement the newest in visitors management applied sciences resembling adaptive visitors indicators to regulate the timing of inexperienced indicators to match present visitors situations.”
If that seems like an enchancment to the way in which visitors is coordinated right this moment within the Hat Metropolis, it’s, a regional planning chief mentioned.
“When you could have real-time adjustment functionality to coordinate visitors you could have higher efficiency,” mentioned Francis Pickering, government director of the Western Connecticut Council of Governments, a regional group that authorized Danbury’s grant request to the state transportation division. “The fiber optic community will permit town the flexibility to enhance visitors movement, scale back congestion, enhance security and scale back carbon emissions.”
To say nothing of decreasing driver frustration, mentioned state Sen. Julie Kushner, D- Danbury.
“I reside on the west aspect, and I see (congestion) each day, so it is a nice step ahead,” Kushner mentioned. “That is a part of the hassle by the legislature and the governor to scale back visitors idling time, scale back carbon emissions and make the state safer and more healthy, so I’m very appreciative of WestCOG’s help.”
WestCOG’s unanimous vote final week to suggest Danbury’s fiber-optic mission to the state Division of Transportation’s Native Transportation Capital Enchancment Program comes at a time when town’s is making an attempt to catch as much as its inhabitants development by bettering its infrastructure.
Along with lecture rooms, which town cannot construct quick sufficient to maintain tempo with runaway enrollment, Danbury is upgrading its water system. On Monday, the Metropolis Council held a public listening to about borrowing $115 million for a water system improve.
“Congestion is an even bigger subject than connecting visitors indicators — it is likely one of the worst issues we’ve got right here in Danbury, and we want state and native officers to get collectively and discuss,” Kushner mentioned. “We have not constructed out our infrastructure to help all the brand new growth and that is why our faculties are overcrowded and our visitors is uncontrolled.”
The mixing of town’s visitors controls might be overseen by Veera Karukonda, Danbury’s visitors engineer, who quarterbacked the set up of an analogous fiber-optic community when he labored in Stamford.
“We have now executed a lot of the design work already in home so we needn’t await a marketing consultant to design the mission,” Karukonda mentioned. “Additionally we’re already in communication with Eversource which owns the utility poles,” mentioned Karukonda, including that the fiber can be put in overhead.
That signifies that if all the things goes as deliberate, town’s new fiber-optic system may very well be put in by the top of 2024, and the work to combine the visitors indicators may start. Town hopes to safe extra grants from the identical state native transportation fund.
“We could have distant entry to all of the programs and all of the operations and visitors patterns and situations, and we are able to monitor it and management it remotely,” Karukonda mentioned.
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