Valdosta to vote on new remote signal control

VALDOSTA, GA (WALB) - The city of Valdosta is working to improve its eyes on the street.

City council members will be voting on a new system that can cut down emergency response times.

The council will discuss buying Timm Units for 128 traffic lights. They can control the signals and monitor traffic from any device that has access to the internet.

Have you ever been out in traffic and spotted an emergency service vehicle struggling to get through intersections? The city of Valdosta is trying to counteract that and similar situations by purchasing 128 new Timm Units.

"Timm Unit is a piece of equipment that is a part of smart technology, what it will do is give us access to communicate with all the signals and cameras that we install these in," said Traffic Manager Larry Ogden.

The city already has cameras in place, so what makes these different? The difference is where they can be controlled from and how.

"The Timm Units will allow us from a desktop, smartphone or tablet to remotely access that Timm Unit and it will give us detail monitoring of the controller. It will let us know what is wrong, what's going right," explained Ogden.

One of the more unique features is the preemption feature that allows emergency service vehicles the ability to control traffic lights when in range of the unit.

"We are trying to get them put into our fire trucks and what that system does is when the fire trucks are coming through the downtown or any signal that has that function turned on, it will give that fire truck the green light," explained Ogden.

The estimated cost of the Timm Units is $400,000 funded through SPLOST.

Ogden said it is worth every penny.

"We'll be considered a smart city, we'll be one of the first smart cities outside of the Atlanta area," said Ogden

Ogden said they have been working on this for three years and that if the Timm Units are approved during Thursday's meeting, the next step will be placing an order as soon as possible.

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