- November 6, 2024
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Palm Coast will spend $199,540 to add closed-circuit cameras and communications switches at 22 intersections this fiscal year.
The high-tech additions will comprise the second phase of the city’s signal optimization project, which involves creating a “small-scale traffic management system” that lets city staff manage intersections remotely, city Traffic Engineer Sean Costello told City Council members at an Aug. 1 council meeting.
The system won’t be automatic. Instead, it will let city staff members monitor traffic flow by computer and make adjustments to traffic signal timing to optimize traffic flow.
The first phase of the project, which has already been completed, involved adding cameras and switches at 12 intersections, and fiber connections at 34 intersections.
“It’s been working well, and as it’s scaling up it should continue to work fine,” Costello told the council.
The council voted unanimously to approve funding the project.
Palm Coast’s method of determining which city streets need maintenance isn’t particularly sophisticated: City staff members get in a truck and drive around the city, noting which roads seem to need repair.
But he city is about to get more methodical in how it repairs its roadways.
At a council meeting Aug. 1, council members approved a contract between the city and road maintenance consultant Transmap.
Transmap will use systematic testing to create a “pavement condition index” for the city to help it stay on top of maintenance before roads deteriorate so much that they need to be repaved — which, at $350,000-$500,000 per lane mile, is much more expensive than repair options such as rejuvenation ($6,000 per lane mile), micro surfacing ($25,000 per lane mile) or mill and overlay resurfacing (about $55,000 per lane mile).
The city will spend $150,000 for the pavement condition index in 2017 and then another $150,000 for the creation of a maintenance master plan and sidewalk/striping condition surveys in 2018.
The council approved the plan unanimously.
When Councilman Bob Cuff said at a City Council meeting July 18 that he was “not a fan of T-shirt politics” — in which residents show up to public meetings wearing color-coordinated T-shirts to show support or opposition on an issue — some residents took offense.
One resident showed up at the Aug. 1 City Council meeting, saying he found Cuff’s statements dismissive.
Cuff responded to the resident during the meeting.
“My point that I was trying to make, although I was accurately quoted from what I saw, was not that I like to discourage or want to ever discourage anybody, especially, from showing up at one of the meetings and addressing us,” Cuff said. “What I was referring to was something I’ve seen literally dozens, perhaps literally hundreds of times in a 40-year legal career, where discussion and debate on different public issues just degenerates into, ‘We’ve got more people here with yellow T-shirts than you do with blue T-shirts, so we should win.’ But to the extent that my comments offended anybody, or were taken to suggest that I don’t like to see people coming here to address us, that was certainly not what I meant to say.”
