The City of Surrey, which is currently the 12th largest city in Canada by population, has been the fastest-growing municipality in British Columbia over the past decade, and is on pace to surpass Vancouver as BC’s largest city sometime over the next twenty years. With this continued rapid growth, there is a growing need for a better, more cost-effective method to more efficiently manage the traffic demand. To address this need, the City applied for, and successfully secured funding from Transport Canada under the Strategic Highway Infrastructure Program to deploy an Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC) Pilot Project. The City and Delcan Corporation agreed to implement and evaluate the ATSC Pilot Project using Delcan’s “Multi-criteria Adaptive Control” system. The corridor selected for the ATSC Pilot Project was 72nd Avenue, between 120th Street and King George Boulevard. The seven closely spaced signalized intersections along 72nd Avenue are controlled by the City’s BiTrans Type 170 traffic signal controllers, and monitored by the City’s McCain “QuicNet” traffic signal management system. The corridor currently operates under coordinated time-based coordination (TBC) operations during the weekdays, and as fully actuated during the weeknights and weekends, with no significant traffic operational problems. The scope of the ATSC Pilot Project was to demonstrate the integration of traffic adaptive control with the City’s existing traffic signal control infrastructure, and to evaluate the benefits of adaptive control. Delcan’s ATSC system has been designed to take advantage of modern technologies and to address the limitations of existing commercially available adaptive control systems. The ATSC system’s open system architecture is flexible to work with the City’s existing Type 170 controllers, vehicle detector loops, and communications network. This paper describes the real world application of an ITS system designed to improve traffic operations, including lessons learned. The pilot project demonstrated the seamless integration of the ATSC system with the City’s existing traffic signal control infrastructure. The field surveys demonstrated that adaptive traffic signal control performed equal to the best optimized TBC signal timing plans during the peak traffic periods, and was able to effectively adjust to unexpected traffic patterns during off-peak periods.
