Archive: Around Town

You're driving on Triphammer Road, thinking about something that happened at work, or your kids, or your parents, or that jerk that cut in line at the mall.  You're not paying attention to your speed because you are used to all those years when the speed limit was 55.  Suddenly you see flashing numbers and you realize that you are well over the 45 miles per hour speed limit, and you immediately hit the brakes to slow down.  That's what most people do when they see radar speed signs.  And you may not have realized that the signs are collecting statistics on speeding that may impact municipal intervention like new stop signs, crosswalks, signage, or sidewalks, like a potential sidewalk project on Dart Drive that could cost taxpayers over half a million dollars.

"We know there are some fairly high speeds," Said Mayor Donald Hartill Monday. "We want to see what the distribution looks like."

The Village of Lansing has four radar signs, two of which are on Dart Drive, one facing east and the other west.  The Town of Lansing has about the same number, including two on North Triphammer Road.  Both municipalities move a sign or two around to address speeding issues in various locations, and both have more permanent installations.

The signs collect data even when they don't appear to be working. Courtney explained that in addition to setting the speed limit, you can set a maximum speed at which the signs will give visual cues to drivers.  They still record speeds higher than that maximum, but the screen remains blank.  The data is retrieved wirelessly either by a Bluetooth connection, or password protected wifi, which allows municipal officials to download the data onto their phones.  Courtney says it is a simple matter of driving a village truck within the 300 foot wifi range, and downloading the data onto a phone.

The data is placed in .CSV (Comma Separated Values in a text file) files that are readable in spreadsheet programs like Excel on Windows computers and Numbers on Macs.  That raw data can then be analyzed manually in the spreadsheet, or using special software that breaks down the data into charts and graphs, such as the Streetsmart software package.  Courtney says that software is costly, so he and Hartill analyze their data manually.

Hartill said an analysis of the data from the two Dart Drive radar signs showed an average of 29 miles per hour, which may indicate a less costly solution than sidewalks may be more appropriate.  But he said that data on the extreme speeds would be more helpful than the average when deciding on what projects to fund.

Village Highway Superintendent John Courtney says that speeds on Dart Drive have gone as high as 60 to 70 miles per hour.  He said that some of those instances may have been Sheriff cars speeding to emergency calls, but most are just speeders.  Courtney said that a number of factors may be skewing the average speed to the low side.

"I wonder if the average speed gets miscalculated because you have a few people that pull out of their driveways, and they're going 5 or 10 miles per hour," he said. "The one sign going east bound... it's hard to put them on a signpost because the signposts move a bit in the wind, and in the soft ground they lean a little bit. So it wasn't triggering cars. We have since adjusted it, so they should be picking up cars."

Courtney says he is also experimenting with changing both the speed limit and the maximum speed at which the sign responds.  Any car going above the speed limit set in the sign is reported as a 'violator' so they can easily be separated by speeds below the limit.  But he said the average speed didn't change when he temporarily set the sign to a speed limit of 30mph last week.

"We changed it back to 30 so we could see what a true speed was," he said. "It shows violators over 25, so we moved it to 30 just to play around with the parameters of the sign to see if there's a big difference. They all averaged out the same.  The only thing that was different was the number of violators."

As for the blank screens, Courtney explained they are a feature of the sign, and that setting the cap too high may have unintended consequences.

"I set it higher just a week ago," he said. "I don't like to set it too high, because people try to push it.  You'll get a motorcycle trying to see if he can touch it. That's why I set them low, because you're just enticing them to rip down through there."

Radar signs come in a variety of models in different sizes, some with special messages like "slow down", solar power, multiple color displays, and more data storage.   Alerts on mid-to higher priced models may include "sharp curve", a smiley face, red/blue strobes, chevrons, a simulated camera flash or a white strobe.  Municipalities willing to pay more can even connect all their signs to the cloud using a cellular connection, enabling them to get a picture of speeding within their own boundaries.

The rechargeable 12 volt batteries are rated for two weeks of use, although Courtney says they change batteries in the Village each week.  The signs can store data on up to five million vehicles.  They can even 'play dead' for a half hour after being forcefully attacked so the vandal will assume they have damaged the signs, and move on without doing actual damage.

The signs are not cheap.  The relatively lower end signs in the Village of Lansing cost about $2,500 each.  Some models go as high as $4,000, and extras like analytic software and cloud data storage can bring the cost still higher.  But it is easy enough to observe, as you follow traffic along town and village roads, that they do deter most speeders, who slow down when they see the signs.  And the data certainly helps municipal authorities as they figure out how best to spend taxpayer money to keep their roads safe.

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