THE RICHARDSON COUNT SYSTEM

The City of Richardson, Texas received a $217,000 Traffic Management (TM) Grant from the Texas Department of Transportation in 1991 to develop an Automated Count System for signal timing optimization. Richardson's project was unique because the turning movement counts (TMCs) needed for signal timing optimization were derived from existing detectors used for actuated signal control. Software was developed in-house to download the detector data from the field, estimate the TMC counts, and build data sets that were imported to the Arterial Analysis Package and used with PASSER II-90. The goal of this two-year project was to develop algorithms and software to estimate TMC's from lane counts and develop methods of using continuous count data from traffic signal controllers.