News Release
ELKHART – Elkhart County Commissioners have approved a one-year agreement allowing StreetLight Data Inc. to provide traffic-volume information derived from internet-connected devices, including mobile phones, as the county transitions away from aging traffic-counting equipment.
The commissioners unanimously approved the independent contractor agreement and a task order during their meeting. The task order has a maximum cost of $52,672 and covers StreetLight’s truck-traffic and transportation-planning software packages.
The county highway department is seeking an alternative to its existing traffic-counting system because the current vendor will no longer support the equipment. StreetLight’s system uses internet-of-things data from devices capable of connecting to the internet as they travel in vehicles. The information is processed through the company’s proprietary RouteScience algorithm to estimate traffic volumes and patterns.
“What street light does is they provide a both historic and current or recent data on traffic volume counts,” Steve Olsson, Elkhart County attorney said. “They utilize what we call ‘IOT,’ or internet of things data to process through their proprietary route science algorithm to collect that traffic volume data.”
Olsson continued, “Internet of things, for the word’s sake, is those things that can access the internet. So that would be your cell phone, other devices within cars – any device that’s capable of accessing the internet when it passes by inside of a vehicle – they’re able to identify that and use that for traffic pattern volume counts.”
County officials said the data is anonymized before reaching StreetLight and is not intended to identify individual people or vehicles. The system does not use license-plate readers or cameras.
“We want to make sure this isn’t something that’s tracking specific human beings,” Commissioner Bob Barnes said.
“All of this is anonymized,” Olsson said. “So when it hits StreetLight system, it has no way of being connected to any specific person, any specific vehicle … This is not a camera-based system at all.”
“And then does it differentiate between a heavy equipment like a semi-truck trailer CDL guy versus a vehicle?” Barnes asked.
“I did not get specific details from them on that, but they have talked through with the highway department to assure them of the accuracy of the information going through there,” Olsson replied. “Again, it’s been vetted as best as the highway department can at this time and it has nothing to do with these flock cameras.”
Highway officials previously compared StreetLight’s data with the county’s existing traffic-counting methods and found the results sufficiently accurate to proceed with a trial. The county will continue using pneumatic tube equipment during the transition.
The one-year trial will allow officials to evaluate the technology’s accuracy and usefulness before deciding whether to continue with it.
“We want to give it a period where they could vet it against the other equipment that they have,” Olsson said. “We still have the pneumatic tube approach that we can use as a backup if needed.”
Source link
