FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Mobile Traffic engineer Jennifer White talked about how the traffic works, why it works and Projects - Midday Mobile - Monday 9-23-24
There will be no personal nor direct attacks on anyone and I would ask that you please try to keep down the loud cheering and the clapping. There will be no booing and no unruly behavior. With that, this is painful and it will be for a long time. After all, these are a couple of high-stepping turkeys and you know what to say about a high stepper. No step too high for a high stepper. This is midday mobile with Sean Sullivan on FM Talk 106-5. Well, Sean's a tough guy. I mean, I think everybody knows that. You know, Sean, he took some licks. He hangs in there. Yeah, what's wrong with the video we got? I mean, the deal we got drank pretty good, don't it? Did you hear what I said? So this is a bad council. I had no doubt about them. That doesn't suck. If you don't like it, you're bad. Last question. Were you high on drugs? Last question. Kiss my ****. But here we go. FM Talk 106-5 and Midday Mobile on this Monday. Glad to have you all a long phone number. Hadn't changed in all these 16 years. 343-01-06 for a call or a text. I imagine you have some questions coming up this hour for my next guest. Speaking of names, you know, our staff meteorologist, Dr. Bill Williams will join us around 1235. Another update on, I have not seen the updates yet. It was Invest 97L, which I said sound like the new model Buick on the road or something, but the Invest 97L is what they predict will become. Maybe like Dr. Bill said this morning, up to a category three hurricane impacting us in Wednesday into Thursday. Well, he's got his update and the flown flights out of the Kiesler Air Force base today, the Air Force and NOAA has. So hopefully we'll get that new data in here and talk to him about that. Round 1235. All right. And I mentioned this morning. I think I mentioned on Friday's show, but I mentioned this morning when I was guest hosting on the morning show that all the questions I've been stacking up for 15 years, I now have somebody to ask them to. Now, as she looks at me, she goes, Oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself into from the traffic engineering department with the city of Mobile? Jennifer White. Welcome aboard. Good morning. Hey, it's good to have you in here. Okay. So I asked you this question off there, but I'll do it again for effect. When we all, you know, in third grade or whenever we said, I know what I want to be when I grow up. Did you say traffic engineer? No, not at all. He did not. I didn't even I probably at that point didn't even know such a thing existed. Yeah. When I went to college, my dad was pushing me toward electrical engineering. Okay. I started off in electrical and circuits are hard. So I was looking around the other engineering degrees and chose civil. It looked like it fit me the best. And it had it has a wide range of things that you can do under that umbrella. You can do structures. I think civil engineering, I was thinking like, well, they're building dams or buildings, you know, construction management, environmental, and probably a little subset of that is traffic and transportation engineering. So I mean, you were there at school and then so you were you did civil engineering. Did you realize then specifically within it, you want to do traffic engineering? No, I kind of kept my concentration on environmental. Okay. So when I got out and started work, the first place I worked for was Mobile County, and they stuck me with traffic engineering. And then I found out I can boy, I like I kind of like this. I get to go out every day into the field. I don't have to sit at a desk all day. And that's a lot of appeal for a lot of the young engineers. I don't want to be tied to a desk. And so out in the field, you know, earning my stripes, staying at like doing manual traffic counts, spending all day doing manual traffic counts with with a partner and just learning from the ground up. It's the best way. Yeah. And when I was at when I was at the county, you know, that Schillinger was a two lane roadway. We were going to five lanes. I got to see that whole process Theodore Dawes Road, the extension over to Schillinger got to be involved in a lot of public involvement and see the stuff in the ground up installing signals, paving roadways, striping signage, the whole nine yards, emergency management after hurricanes. You talked about the invest 97. Yeah. So just kind of got involved in it. Then really liked it like the two, you know, that part that I'm out in the field part of the day. So my day was different every day. There was no set come in. I've got to do this. It's like every day that we get a new challenge to get people to do this for a living now. It we are a few and far between. Okay. We just hired our assistant director back in April. It took us a year to find him. So we've been without that one person for over a year that really is integral to some of the projects we're doing. So in y'all's in the traffic engineering department, your responsibilities aren't just like we're going to dive into lights now, traffic lights, but it's broader than that. It's very broad. So we have a maintenance division and under the maintenance division, we do we do all the signing and striping of the roadways. Okay. So every time there's a, you know, a project to go on, we hit we review that project, whether it's just resurfacing or a widening project or any of the rebuild projects like broad and St. Louis street. We review the plans with the department that's over that project at the beginning and we look at all the traffic elements of that project for them, whether it's the signalizations, the striping, the signing, the parking, anything like that. We look at with them pedestrian, bicycle facilities, we do all of that. And then we also just signs down. You call 311. We're the ones that go fix that. I'd like this roadway. We stripe. We either contract that or do it ourselves. Okay. So it is, it's a lot broader than just the traffic lights. Yes, it is. And then we have, we have our electrical, we oversee the traffic signal systems and maintain those. We have over 315 lights signal in the city. You beat me down. I was going to say, how many lights are going to go? It's over 315. We picked up a few in the last year. You know, annexation bus and new lights into the mix. So you've got 315. Do you have a, I don't know how to ask this. Is there like a heads up display somewhere that you look at? We're building that right now where you can say, here's all the lights and yes. Are they doing, you know, are they on the screen? They're all online. They're all shown, but they're not all online yet. We are actively participating in a project right now that is underway. Okay. We deployed the first 30. No, let's see. The first week we deployed 68 intersections to get them online. That was the last week of August. So they're, I mean, either to wireless or wired coming back to headquarters. That's right. We either have a cell modem or fiber optic connection to every signal. Okay. So you can say, Hey, the the light is, I won't even give a location. So somebody catches halfway through and think of lights out, but there's a light at X street and X street is out and you can see it. We can see it. We can pull up what it's running. It'll show us what it's currently running, the program that it's running. And it'll actually send us text messages if there's a fault. So if this signals on flash, it'll actually warn us and give us a heads up that we can deploy somebody right away to fix it. Yeah, those things. Is it your phone that texts come to? Yeah, I have one of those two when something happens with the transmitter. It doesn't matter. It's two o'clock in the morning, whatever it does. Yes, it does. Indeed. All right. So 315 lights. So then I'm going to ask a question about averages. I'm thinking, Oh, now there's a lot of lights in the mix average length of a traffic light. If I pull up, you're going to pull up at the light and I know some obviously longer. What are we looking at in the city of Mobile? How long should I expect to stay? Most cycle links in the city on on our major roadway systems. Right. They're going to going to be about 120 seconds. Okay. We have some on airport boulevard that at one time were 210. Uh huh. We've tried to get them down to 190, which that's quite a savings on a signal. But you got to think about that section where the service roads are. I do right here. Yeah. That we're servicing not only what would be a standard intersection has four approaches. And you're servicing maybe eight movements. Explain that to me. Eight movements. So you've got a through movement and a left turn. Okay. That's usually what you see at a display. You see the the through movement, the green balls. And then you'll see like a left arrow for the left turns. And every approach. Yeah. So every approach has that. Okay. So the airport boulevard, you've got two service roads. Here we go. I mean, you've really you look at it. You've got three individual intersections really. I'm with you. I'm going to try this thing every day. And we're controlling them with one controller. So it did it to give everybody their time. It goes that that total cycle link starts going up. And we back because of the service road. So that's the amount of traffic on the service roads and the addition of the service roads. So it's just a it's a it's a balance. We've tried to cut them down. We recently retined those and we've tried to cut it down as much as we can. But you do, you know, something suffers if you cut down that green time. It's not as it is a zero-sum game. If you move one thing here, something else suffers, yeah. But do you look at when you do this, like, okay, here I can picture this. I have the service road thing I could go on and on about but we'll do that today. But if you look at this light and say, here's the four approaches that came up with eight. But really, only two of the approaches are dominant. Is that I don't know if I'm using the right term. That is true. Like like airports, look at airport boulevard, right? Yeah. So East West is big time. There are some bigger north-south roads, but there are some that are not so big. Yeah. Most of the roadways when we say when we when we've retimed airport boulevard, we are coordinating airport boulevard. Okay. We're not coordinating that side road. That side roads, you know, it just comes up. They should expect to stop. They should expect to wait because we're given the majority of the movement progression. The way we're designing the signal is to move airport boulevard. And so you do get delay on the side street. We try to balance that because you still got to you still got to get those people off and into the main roadway. We try to it balances, but the progression is designed for airport boulevard. Okay, we're going to come right back aboard this. Questions already piling up in my head here because here we are the the main road. But then what happens when I look at one of these north-south routes and the lights still green for them and it has been too harsh through it. We'll talk about timing and all that. When we come back, plus we've got calls and texts waiting. Jennifer White, our cast right here on Midday Mobile. This is Midday Mobile with Sean Sullivan on FMTalk 1065. All right, welcome back FMTalk 1065 Midday Mobile on this Monday. Glad to have y'all along. 3430106 how you get through. Enjoy the conversation on there and off there. We're Jennifer White, Traffic Engineering Department with the City of Mobile. Right, we talked about the more traveled roadways and the less traveled roadways. And there's some, you know, this is that thing that we talk about. This text line rings with it. There I'm sitting there on airport and here's some north-south route, not a big one, one of the smaller ones. And I sit there and watch, maybe there was one car, maybe there wasn't. I'm sitting and I'm just watching watching my red light get redder and their lights stay green and there's nobody going. What's happening there? That's a fell detection system. So the city has multiple ways of that we use to detect traffic at the intersection. So you are looking at it. It's not just there's a detection system. The old way was a magnetic loop. So it was just a wire in the roadway that was made a loop. They're like a five by 50 loop in the roadway that you disturb when you drive over. Okay, wait. So back in the day, those were there because we just think if you roll back and forth, it's nothing. Yeah, it picks you up one time. Okay, because we just thought you go over it and then you ease back and you go over it again, it'll make it think it's all it's doing is you're going off and then you're starting back over when you pull back. Okay, all right. Well, there goes that there goes that myth. Okay, so but that was but now now we have cameras. We have radar and we have a combination. Some some of our things are combination camera and radar so that we get dual detection. So it's a camera looking you're not watching it. No, we're not. But is there a program that says it looks like there's X number of cars or what is it? What's it looking for? Well, it's looking for cars. So that in the programming of the camera, we go in there and draw that same little loop that we use in the roadway. Okay, we draw the imaginary lines on the roadway. When you drive across that imaginary line, the camera picks it up. Okay. And it and then puts the signal to the controller that there's a car at that in that lane waiting for that, you know, signal. Okay, so the way the signals are, you have to go through a ring. It's almost like a ring. So every phase has a number like one through eight. And you have to go through and service all that. And once it starts that ring, that circle, it can't go backwards. Okay, it has to go to the next one and the next one. And then, you know, it will skip them if there's no one there. If the detection is okay, if the detection is good. But the way detection faults when it faults so that you don't ever not get a signal, it automatically puts a call in every time if there's something wrong with the detection. Okay, so if it, if it, if it's not working, it's going to assume there's a vehicle there. That's right. And the good thing, I mean, good, I say good thing, the thing that's going on right now is the city is, is really getting a lot of money to repair that stuff that has gone years and years without being able to repair it. Is that like software Jennifer at that place? Or is it like a part? Is it like a go turn around? Sometimes the cameras is like, we hear a mobile, we get a lot of issues with lightning. Lightning likes to strike our cameras quite a bit. They're quite attractive, apparently. Okay, they're elevated. They're elevated. They're usually, you know, when you're at sea level and the highest thing is only 30 feet in the air, they'll get zapped. They get zapped. They have protection on them, but that doesn't mean that lightning's better than that protection sometimes. And we have to go out there and replace that. Sometimes the wire that runs down back into the control box will have to replace that. And sometimes cameras just get, I don't even know, you know, they're, they're finicky and they stare at the same thing all day long and then they, they become stuck on that and they don't see anything new. And we just have to go out there and reset them like you do your iPad. Like high tech fixes to reboot the reboot. That's right. That's my IT department around the station. I just say, have you all rebooted yet? Sometimes we have to reboot those cameras. And it's just, it's like anything else. It's a piece of computer equipment out there. Those controllers in those intersection boxes are just computers designed to be outside all the time. During the break, we talked about something. Our top. Our top is, it's regional transportation operation program. And so it's a cooperative between the city of Mobile, Al Dodd and Mobile County. And we're all sharing funds and sharing projects to get every signal on a state route, a city street and a county roadway into a central software system where we can see them and control them in real time eventually. And so we're doing a big push this fall and this will end a summer into fall. We should have them all by the end of October, at least coming into a signal. So there'll be a new controller in every box, may not be a new control box, but there'll be a new controller in every box. And either a cell modem or fiber optic communication to that signal. But do you, in that case with this technology, does it still take somebody at the department going, look, there's a bunch of extra traffic or is there something in there that says, this is changing, let me update. Yeah, not yet, are we to that point? But what we are doing is we're putting new timing and all the traffic signals. So years ago, 20, 30, 40 years ago, sometimes even before I was born, some of our intersections are, you had maybe three time a day plan. So you'd have a morning peak plan, you'd have a midday plan, and you'd have an evening plan. This is what I was wondering, right? So it would run that morning plan, maybe till noon, and then run the new plan, noon plan, and then about four or five o'clock going four or four 30 going to that evening plan, and then about eight or nine going to free operation. So now we realize those times in between need their own time of day plan also. So now we're putting in those into those signals, we're putting in an AMP, we're putting between the AM and noon peak, we're putting that noon and another plan in between noon and PM. And then sometimes we're a little more fine touch to it. A little fine touch because on some of those busier roadways where we're running those longer cycle links, we can back off between those peaks and run shorter cycle links and let the signal cycle more often. And so keep traffic kind of moving rather than waiting those long periods. What was happening in between? You were waiting long periods because it was running this program until it was set up for higher volumes of traffic. So now we're looking at more programs during the day. And to figure out the right time to slice that pie smaller, are you going to be talking about doing the manual traffic counts when you first got in this? But I mean, it's something being done there is going, Hey, it's, we'll check it at 11 15 every day or whatever. They do like a week long 24 hour counts is what they do when before we time a signal. So we're capturing data for over a week, at least a week, at least every seven days. Sometimes we're capturing two weeks of traffic counts. What about even factoring in, you know, different times a year, folks know here, like the track schools in schools, not at end, it's fall, it's spring, we do things differently, I don't know. We do have some of our signals. We do do special occasion or special programming. We have a whole set up around South Alabama. Say like there's a Jags game? Yep, we have a whole set of and actually send somebody out to work the game to turn it on and turn it off the special program. They they're usually sitting in Dunkin Donuts with a laptop, but they're watching the traffic on the roadway and see when that demand gets to the point that we need to dump traffic into campus. Huh, so many questions on the text lines. Well, when we get a few of these before we go to the news and we'll come back, Chris says to ask you, in order to keep it simple, why not run the lights on airport for five minutes green, all of them, and then the next three minutes, let all the inlets come in. You don't have how far traffic would be backed up on those side streets in five minutes. And I think some of our side streets hold as much traffic as our main roads. Right. And on all side streets are the same. All of them, because you look at something like a university, that's huge. You look at the four men are closed, Hillcrest and airport are closed in volume. Schillinger actually runs a little higher volume than airport now. Yeah. And so it's difficult to do that. The three minutes in between, I'd have people at my door, I think. Well, what about in about 30 seconds, a little more and answer this if we can't, we will answer it after the break, what should be the expectation? Here's my question. If I leave, so let's say we're driving here, we're leaving, we're coming in the city, let's say I'm at Schillinger and I get the green light. All right, here we go. Do I have some expectation that I should catch a couple more green lights or should I just expect to catch everyone red? If I'm driving the speed limit, once we finish the the project and all the all the detection is also working, you should be able to make it at least with no more than one or two stops in between that corridor. All right. Now, the behind in that corridor is not all of Airport Boulevard. That corridor probably goes from like Schillinger to Hillcrest, Hillcrest University, University. Okay, so they're separate. They're separate. Okay, so there's not one big corridor. All right, so much more to learn. We'll come right back more of your questions. And yeah, you got that right. More of my questions are guests Jennifer White from the traffic engineering department at the city of Mobile. This is Midday Mobile with Sean Sullivan on FM Talk 1065. Right at 1235, the FM Talk 10065 and welcome back Midday Mobile on this Monday. My back into our conversation just mitted from Jennifer White from the traffic engineering department at the city of Mobile. But now we'll go to the tropical weather engineering department with our staff meteorologist, Dr. Bill Williams, a doc update here on what I guess, has it changed? Is it still in vest 97L or what are we looking at? Well, the system in the Caribbean has developed into a tropical depression, highest winds are 30 miles per hour. It's drifting to the north at around six miles per hour right now. It's expected to turn a little more to the northwest that will take it through the rest of today and tonight. And it'll pass through what's called the Yucatan channel, which is between the Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba. It'll continue to intensify and will become a hurricane. And that most likely will be tomorrow morning. At that point, it will start to what we call recurve, that is, turn more to the northeast. And we now expected to track up to the Florida panhandle. Right now, the best estimate is that it will move in the oh, somewhere between the Tallahassee area and what we call the Big Bin, the Big Curved Area of coastline in northern Florida. And it looks now like it will make landfall as possibly a category three or four. Wow. And make landfall Thursday afternoon. This is a, I mean, to go that you once again, you said we've now gone to a depression, you said 30 mile per hour sustained winds to in just a few days, something that could be a category four. I mean, that's a significant intensification. And you know, it's going into right now as it looks, it's going into an area that's but hits several times in the last few years. Like Michael, right? Michael went in there. Michael. Yeah. Well, right, Michael, Dalia, and several of them have gone in around Cedar Key. And it's very possible that it could go in that area at Cedar Key or possibly Appalachia Cola. But in that area right now, now, could it change its course a little bit? That's possible. It's very early. But the models now tend to carry it toward the Big Bend area of the Florida Peninsula. After that, it will go on up into Georgia and will then turn to the northwest and head out of into Tennessee and Kentucky. Of course, it'll be weakened to a tropical depression, but it's going to be a problem for Georgia, Tennessee, part of the Carolinas, even Northern Alabama as it recurs and then turns into this northwest direction and kind of spread its rain all over the Ohio Valley. Wow. Dr. Bill, for us here on the coast in coastal Alabama, what's our timeline and what do you expect? You know, if we start, we're going to feel winds. I mean, of course, we'd be on what you're saying, we'll be on the dry side of the storm. But what is Thursday, are we going to notice anything here or Wednesday? What do you see for us? Well, we're lucky to get some rain out of this system as it approaches the Florida panhandle, the eastern portion of the panhandle. If that's the track that it finally takes, we'll get some showers, but we'll be on what we call the good side or the weak side. And the winds will come out of the of the north. And so we'll get the waters will be pushed away from the way from the coast. And but we will get some rain and some gusty winds. But the real problem will be from Panama City all the way over to Cedar Key, in effect, possibly over to around Clearwater and down toward Tampa, where they'll be pushing water into that coast, those coastal area, really a long stretch of coastline. Dr. Bill, we appreciate this update. Of course, we'll be talking with you throughout the next few days as this which would become, I guess, Helene. Isn't that right? Helene, that's exactly right. Helene. So we'll be checking back with you for updates. I appreciate you chime in and giving us the update on this Monday. Okay, Sean. All right, there he goes, our staff meteorologist, Dr. Bill Williams, 40 plus years. You don't want to tell me how many plus 40 plus four decades of calling him correctly around here on the Gulf Coast. So it's always good to get his update. And you know, I'm sorry for those people over there, but to hear the track is at least right now, leaning to our east is a good thing. Traffic engineering department happy with that as well. Yes. Yeah, I think about that too. You got the regular everyday traffic. And then we think about hurricane evacuations and we contraflow on, I know, the state's department, but on the interstates and all that, you talked about interstates with me too that if there was a wreck on the interstate or something, I didn't think about that, how that could affect traffic on local roads, right? Yes. And part of this our top program would allow us to allow us to do, because part of the, when we're implementing the changes to the traffic signal, we're adding cameras to the system where we can actually watch the roadways. So we're, you know, every few intersections we're putting up a little higher pan tilt zoom camera that we can 360 around and see all the traffic, traffic movements, we can watch them. So if there was an incident on the interstate that they needed to get reroute people through the local streets, we could retouch, you know, flush those signals and get that traffic moving in that extra volume back onto the interstate at another location around the incident. I'm thinking like, I 10 will get something will happen on a 10 big surprise. And then, you know, us local folks will be like, Oh, I'm going to get on government street to go through the bankhead. And then you realize, and that happens, that happens almost daily during the summer. Right, you and 30,000 that your friends just figured that out and you end up on government is just bumper to bumper, bumper to bumper. Yeah, anywhere from between broad and the tunnel, when people are rerouting off that interstate and that five o'clock traffic that is already heavy or just dumping downtown, it causes extreme issues. You can't get out from the side streets onto there. Everybody wants to go through the tunnel. It's one lane through the tunnel. When you get to the other side, you've got three traffic signals over there that aren't talking to the ones on government street at all. And they're dumping Austin at the same time that a lot of five o'clock traffic, they're dumping the Austin people. But with this bigger communication, your discussion for the county level and all that, would that then be integrated? That could be something that we could, when we start doing, you know, traffic reactive kind of timing for those lights, it could be something we could help. We already look at it. Al dot looks at those. Those are actually their operations, but they they look at those lights during those and we call them, Hey, can y'all look at this for us? You know, this backing up, we see it, we're closer to it and get them to, you know, see if there's anything they can do. But it does get hard because you, once you get across, there's a whole other element of traffic across the river. So I have the meat and that's kind of what you described, too, about airport Boulevard earlier with us that I had this idea because I don't do this for a living that they all kind of were on the same. But you said, you take them, there's like zones. Is that the right term or other? There's different coordinated system. Coordinated system. So from Schillinger to somewhere is Schillinger is this own system. It picks up a few of the intersections on both sides of airport Boulevard. It basically goes from Tanner Williams to, I think, hit road at this point. And I was telling you, you know, once you get out past half a mile to a signal, it really doesn't, you can't pick it up into coordination because the platoon of cars get too spread out. And so that ideal is somewhere between a quarter mile and a half mile to bring a signal into coordination. Can you get ready, y'all? Can you can we can we spill the beans on this? So you and I were talking during the break about my trials and tribulations with with airport. And I said, if somebody would drive the speed limit from here to here, what chance would they have of catching the green lights? And you're not talked about that. But you also said something during the break. Sometimes slower than the speed limit. The speed they're not set for the speed limit. Yeah, because we use a time is almost similar to a time space diagram where you've got the distance down the road and between signals. And then you've got the cycle links of every signal lined up. So I'm off. If I just say, well, heck, Jennifer, I'm driving. It's 45 miles an hour. I'm going 45 miles an hour. I should be able to make that. It's not designed. Now, during some of the off peaks, that would probably better you better be able to do that. But like during the peak times, I think when they redesigned Airport Boulevard, it was just under that 40 mile an hour limit. So somewhere between 35 and 40 is more prime for you to make all of the lights than it is if you're going 45. See, you see me grinning because I feel like I've got like the secret to it. Take your time, take your time a little bit more. Don't rush to that next signal. No, that because like we were not 45. See, I was so obsessed with the speed limit being 45. Therefore, this whole must be built off of 45 or 35, whatever road you're on when it's not something less. We haven't admitted the new time has passed, you know, university, but going out west, but through the core. So that will shop an area, you know, between like a zillion sages, it's under 40 with the speed limits 40, but it's just under 40 miles an hour. We'll get you. I'm going to use this through more signals. That's all I want. I just want to not run down the brakes. You want that special button to push for it. That's right. You've got one down there, right? You can just press, you've got one in your car too. You can press and make all the light screen. That's the part. That's the part. Yeah, that's the only part you get there. A lot of techs here. I want to get into you. For this one, why do the lights on Dolphin Street flash yellow in the late and early hours? And will the lights ever sink between Spring Hill Memorial Hospital and I-65? Yes. We are currently working on that project for Dolphin Street. It's actually from Sage to Rhine's Road that we're working on. We're just got our go to purchase the new equipment from this is all federal money. There's a long approval process for getting the money. Then there's a secondary project coming right behind us that's going to do some access management changes and some other changes to the roadway. We're trying to get the signals communicating to each other and put in the new timing prior to that project starting so that we can at least run that project through that construction a little better. But yes, that is like inches away. You think this will be something, obviously you see it as a traffic engineer, but this is something that just civilian Sean will notice. Yeah, you should notice something. I mean, because I was talking about that intersects that group of roadways that we talked about the master clock and the local clock on the intersections. And we used to physically go out like to say before Black Friday on that week of Thanksgiving and somebody would have to go out with a laptop, plug into every intersection and reset those clocks because they weren't communicating to each other to have their clocks at the same time. And that's when you would see that real off of the sink of the signals is if the clocks drifted because they weren't even synced with the other clock at the other intersection. That's right. The clocks wouldn't be the same. So we'd go and we periodically would have to go out and reset these clocks physically by plugging in a laptop that had the master clock on it. And that's time consuming. Think about the number of intersections that we had in coordination at the time, but they, you know, we had communication issues out there where the fiber off it was broken three places and detection not working. So I mean, it's just a lot like this is hardware. A lot of it is hard where there's not working. I tell you fix, you know, when I first started work at the city, we didn't have any of these. We didn't have federal funding coming to us to work on traffic signals. And so it always was part of the operation budget. Well, the city went through some really lean years, like around '08, like the rest of the country was going through lean years. The city had lean years. Right. And I tell you something changed between like 2016 and even 2020, we started getting when the mayor and the council did the CIP program and implemented that penny tax. Some of that money was coming to us to do some of this stuff. So we started, you know, on airport Boulevard, and then the mayor saw, you know, and some of the council saw the benefit of these projects and started funding it more. And then we started getting federal money for it. So the MPO refunded some of their congestion management money that had always been just used to widen roadways and traffic signals. So you've been, you've seen obviously considerable change. Yes. Since you've been in the position. Yes. A couple more here, if we get the news and we'll come back, people asking, where does one send feedback for lights that will not change from red to green? I travel one that will only change when the car enters the left turn lane, but I need to go straight. It just cycles through the other directions. So I have somebody 311 comes directly to us. So if they call 311 or, I guess, 208-5311, if they're using a cell phone, if they'll call that number and leave details with that person that answers that call for them, that sends directly to us and we can go out and investigate what's going on. So one of these things that they want it fixed to let you know. Yes. And that's something you're welcoming that information? Yes. So most definitely. All right, come back. We will, no way, we'll get all these questions asked, but we'll try to ask a lot of them when we return right here on midday mobile. You're listening to midday mobile, with Sean Sullivan on FMTalk 1065. Call Sean now at 3430106. By 1251, FMTalk 1065 and to midday mobile this Monday, this segment of the show brought to you by 1-800-GOT-JUNK online at 1-800-GOT-JUNK.com. That's my buddy Trey. He's been doing it for 16 years in Mobile in Baldwin County, getting junk out of, not just in-house. You know, we talk about this because you'll say, Sean, you know, people think of us, you know, got a bunch of boxes in a room or attic or a garage or something like that, they do that every day. But the big stuff they take on above ground pools, trampoline, storage buildings, if you've got that in a property you just bought or you're done, maybe your youngest child's in graduate school, it's time to let the pirate swingset go. Whatever it is, you say, how am I going to do that? You're going to do it with my buddy Trey with 1-800-GOT-JUNK. It could be junk at an office, it could be a storage unit. Anywhere you got junk you need gone, big stuff too. 1-800-GOT-JUNK. So go online or pick up the phone, either way, 1-800-GOT-JUNK.com or the name is the number called 1-800-GOT-JUNK and make that appointment today and get that junk out of your way with 1-800-GOT-JUNK. Continue our conversation. This is, and I'm realizing now, as I've learned little bits, I now have secondary and tertiary questions for you. So we might have to do this again. Jennifer White with Traffic Engineering with the City of Mobile, our guest. So many text here. Let me try to pick a few. People are asking about AI. So several people have talked about AI. Is that a thing in the traffic world? Not yet. Do you predict it will be? Yes, I would think it would be. Because I was wondering, one of the questions I had put on my list, it got to, but is there predictive software for traffic lights? There is kind of what we call fully actuated kind of, there are some programs out there that take data in live from the systems. So they're receiving traffic counts constantly and making adjustments to the signal timing. That seems like a real place for computing to go, okay, this is happening, this is happening, and then. It is, and it's a very, there's several different, probably a multitude of companies that sell their software as being the one that you should use. But it takes a lot of data. So it is a lot of detection zones that you have to maintain to get that data. Okay. And it is, it is something you need to start looking at when you're at capacity on your roadways. We're not there yet. We're not. What? Thursday afternoon airport. It feels like it, but we are not there. Like, it does capacity mean that there would be capacity is failure. And so like, nothing would be moving. We couldn't move traffic. You could, there wouldn't be enough room to move out of this one area into the next kind of thing. But you got to be a head of that, right? Not you, but cities, municipalities have, you know, that's part of us doing this big, our top program and this re timing as that we are ready for growth, you know, growth and additional traffic. Mobile has been at zero growth for traffic for years now, like over 10. And even when we project, you see the look I'm giving you. I know. Zero growth. Zero growth. The wood has changed. It just seems like, well, anytime we have a project and we, like right now we're dumping more products, more traffic on airport Boulevard from Isaiah going toward the interstate because McGregor's club said that they don't have that option to take dolphin street. That changed a lot. It changed dolphin street. Have you been out like trying to get out of the hospital at five o'clock and it's easy now? Yeah, it won't be that way once McGregor's opens back up. So we're trying to get ahead of that and get that input, that new system implemented out there so that we can get that because what needs, what's needed out there is another left turn lane on the bridge going off the interstate to get onto the interstate. But you can't widen that bridge and we can't replace it either. There's just not funds for that. And there's other ways like the East West I've taken in, you know, situations, necessity is the mother of invention because airports like, at least to me seems so crowded using Ziegler, you know, and heading out that way as the East West. I mean, there's a lot of work being done out there. So obviously that's with some design, I guess, how much is the city? How much is the county? I don't know. Well, yeah, the Ziegler project part of that was in the most of that's in the city now, all the way out to Schillinger. Right. Most, somewhat was done under county projects though, something that widening that'll start pulling more traffic for that East West movement now that it's complete. People have a tendency to avoid construction jobs, especially long term like that, that was working under, you know, they were open, but you were having to go through those work zones and you're whatever lane you were using was just about changing every day. So I mean, I was out there and I would get confused when I would drive through the project to look at whatever I needed to go look at. Well, it's still, yeah, it's still there's that section out there when you this is out getting to snow. Yeah, they've moved my lanes back and forth a couple times. Let's see the, oh my gosh, let's see, relatively new light at highway 90. And I believe lands down next to the light heading West on 90 needs help holds up 90 traffic 50 to 60 cars sitting with no action on either side of the road doesn't appear the light needed at all. That's from Sam. So once again, on all these, and there's a bunch of these, that's 311, if they see something not working, this one, Mike says, okay, I see a green light that changes to red as I approach at 3 a.m. Am I the only person at the intersection? I guess that's a bad detection. So it's getting a call on the side street, even though no one's there because people are saying the same thing that I lamented to you during a break there that, you know, it's two in the morning or if like this morning I came to do the morning show four something in the morning and there's not a whole bunch of people in the airport, but not a whole bunch of people are forming. I'm sitting there forming. Yeah, forming is one of our worst ones too. And so we are actively, well, airport Boulevard, we've got full funding. So that once we do this timing that happens this fall, we're coming back and replacing cabinets and fixing detection and doing more to get everything new out there. So that's funded and that'll, that's some federal funding that we got and that'll take place and fix all of that between Hillcrest and University are just past Hillcrest. There's a couple of intersections past Hillcrest. So you'll come back and fix detection. Six months and take a victory lap around here? What are we going to do? Well, maybe next year. Okay. Yeah. And then we have we're actively seeking a highway safety grant right now. We're going to try to turn a hundred thousand dollars of city money into a million dollars to do nothing but fix detection. And so because out of 315 intersections or more, we have got hundreds of detection zones that need to be repaired and eight million dollars in detection repairs. Wow. So we're trying to take a big bite out of it and start some of these. So a lot of them we have funding for and we're just, you know, going through the process of either getting that funding approved through Audiot because it's federal funds are ordering material and getting it in so that we can go out and replace it. Okay. We'll get you back at some point to get an update, Jennifer. I learned so much today. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. All right. We'll be back next hour. Todd Stacey joins us right after the news.