Case Study – Farmington gets more traffic data in less time

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The City of Farmington (Pop. 43,412) has approximately 80 signals, which they count on a three-year rotation. Traffic data collection is done to review signal timings, and to honor requests from their MPO, Community Development Planners, Police Department, City Council and citizens. The city decided to update their traffic count program with Miovision to assist their Traffic Technician with the time-consuming, and increasingly difficult, task of manually counting cars and pedestrians.

Challenges

• Manually collecting Turning Movement Counts prevented the Traffic Technician from spending time responding to requests and coordinating work orders for traffic control device work.
• Farmington experiences the traffic volumes of a city twice its size, since it is a shopping destination and industrial hub for a large surrounding area.
• Traffic volumes were becoming too high to accurately count by hand; some intersections have as many as 90,000 each day.

Solution

Use Miovision to automate traffic data collection and reduce the labor-hours required in the field.

• Automating counts frees up to complete higher-level technical work instead of counting cars.
• The city saves overtime wages needed to collect counts during peak hours.
• The Traffic Technicians work outside of his regular hours is greatly reduced.

Farmington’s Business Case

Farmington assembled a business case which compared conducting 30 Turning Movement Counts, 6 hrs in length using Miovision versus the labor hours and costs associated with manual counting.

Using Miovision reduced time in the field by 66% (see Figure 1). Farmington’s Traffic Technician uses the extra time to more quickly administer work orders to install and maintain traffic control devices, and be more responsive to requests from City Council and citizens.

Figure 1: Yearly Labor Commitment 30 Manual Turning Movement Counts required 217.5hrs of labor. The same counts with Miovision required 75hrs of labor.

The overall costs of switching to Miovision created an 11% yearly savings (see Figure 2). Supported by Figure 1, the business case shows that Miovision significantly alleviates the city engineer’s workload as it applies to data collection while saving the city money.

Figure 2: Annual Costs for 30 Turning Movement Counts. Using Miovision led to a $690/yr savings.

Download City of Farmington Case Study

Conclusions

Using Miovision to automate and quicken the traffic data collection process significantly frees up labor hours for their Traffic Technician. Some of the key benefits are:

• Reduced labor hours dedicated to traffic data collection by 66%
• Increased agility responding to work orders and City Council signal requests
• Produced more accurate data than possible with manual counting
• Ability to collect data on holidays and weekends with reduced overtime labor costs
• Saved 11% of their operating budget per year compared to manual data collection

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