UCI Aims to Bring Traffic Technology Up to Speed : Research: With a $3-million contract, the university seeks to find ways that advances in defense and aerospace industries can benefit commuters.

UC Irvine has won a $3-million state contract to determine whether defense, aerospace and other high-tech industries that can put a man on the moon will be able to help Southern California commuters, the university announced Wednesday.

“This is giving us an opportunity to gauge our technology to help solve our traffic problems,” said Will Recker, director of the UC Institute of Transportation Studies at the university.

Caltrans, which already has a “smart corridor” on the Santa Monica Freeway with video cameras and changeable message signs, is trying to find ways that space-age technology can help drivers going to work.

“There possibly are some developments that the defense and aerospace industries have but have not been tried in a transportation environment, and we would like to open up our system to what they might be,” said Ralph Blackburn, a supervisor in Caltrans’ Orange County office.

For instance, traffic engineers are interested in whether NASA’s computer-assisted video imaging processing, a technique that reads and translates photographs of outer space, can do the same with traffic jams.

Currently, Caltrans and some cities, including Anaheim, depend mostly on hundreds of “detection loops,” electronic detectors cut into the pavement, that, with the aid of a traffic computer, tell traffic engineers how fast vehicles are moving between two points.

But installing detectors is costly, and they have a 5% failure rate, Blackburn said.

Specifically, during the next three years, the institute will monitor three locations in Southern California, including the intersection of Harbor Boulevard and Katella Avenue near Disneyland in Anaheim, a 10-mile area that includes the Costa Mesa, Santa Ana and San Diego freeways near Irvine, and the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles County.

Because of the tremendous number of special events including football and baseball games at Anaheim Stadium, Disneyland, and its convention centers, Anaheim already has a traffic management center, said Don Dey, Anaheim’s principal traffic engineer.

Dey said the city uses closed-circuit cameras linked to a computer center and changeable message signs to help motorists leave the stadium.

“We have a lot of the pieces to the program, but we’re slowly getting into this and there’s a lot we don’t know. And that’s where UCI comes in,” Dey said.

“How do we adapt all the advances that have taken place in the defense and electronic industries and apply them to traffic? We’re 10 to 20 years behind that technology in regards to traffic,” Dey said.

Once Recker’s research is finished, traffic engineers are hoping that they’ll be able to recommend what systems work best.

“What we’re trying to do is to see if there’s congestion, by identifying alternative road routes, and giving that information immediately to motorists either by changeable signs or over a highway advisory radio station,” Dey said.

Commuters should begin to notice some of the research effects soon, including more responsive signals, improved information on changeable signs, and enhanced highway advisory radio, Recker said.