County Pays $1 Million To Ease Traffic Congestion
Miami-Dade Public Works is actively solving a problem that should ease traffic in the county.
Loops, or traffic detection sensors, are those black oval lines at an intersection. As cars approach an intersection and roll over the lines, the loops tell the traffic signal when to go red and when to stay green.
When they’re operating, the busiest street at an intersection will only go red when the cross intersection has a car waiting. When they’re broken, the light goes red about every minute, whether there’s a car waiting or not. This, officials said, is one of the main causes of traffic congestion.
In Miami-Dade County, 20 percent of the loops are broken. While that’s not bad compared to the rest of Florida, which has a 40 percent loop failure, Miami Dade Public Works’ Bob Williams said it’s a problem that needs to be solved.
“Twenty percent is more than we want. It’s causing a decrease in the quality of our traffic flow and we’ve set out to attack this problem,” Williams told Local10’s Rob Schmitt.
Williams said the county gave him about $1,000,000 to fix all 2,000 broken loops. He said the project should be completed in one to two years.
Miami Beach Vice Mayor Richard Steinberg discovered the problem. Sick of sitting at red lights for no reason at all, he asked Public Works why this is happening.
That’s when the county discovered that many more loops were broken than it had originally thought.
Steinberg said he’s excited to see what kind of progress fixing the loops makes for traffic in the county.
“All of us drive on the roads and we sit at those lights. If we can just get through them a little more quickly, we’ll all be a lot happier,” he said.