The North Central Texas Council of Governments is introducing the Freight Priority program, which aims to optimize traffic flow for trucks.North Central Texas Council of Governments
Freight North Texas, an ongoing planning program led by the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), is working to eliminate stops at traffic lights with an intelligent traffic signal optimization program that has been adapted from transit authority systems for trucks to enhance the safety, mobility, efficiency and air quality associated with freight movements in the Dallas-Fort Worth region.
Another statewide project, Texas Connected Freight Corridors, that received federal funding to provide traveler information to freight vehicles through connected vehicle technology for what’s known as The Triangle – I-35, I-45 and I-10 – found in a user survey that last-mile deliveries were still an issue: getting off the freeways and getting through traffic lights in the warehouse districts. That became the impetus for the Freight Priority project.
The Lone Star State placed 13 locations – the most of any single state – on the top 100 most congested bottlenecks for trucks in America list compiled annually by the American Transportation Research Institute. NCTCOG selected a team lead by planning and design consultants Kimley-Horn to conduct Freight Priority, a five-year program that identifies 500 traffic signals across metro DFW that would most benefit from freight-flow optimization.
“In north Texas, since it's the center of the U.S. for so many truck and freight routes, this is an ideal location to have a program begin like this,” said Leigh Hornsby, managing principal at Public Information Associates.
Kent Kacir, project manager at Kimley-Horn, said to his knowledge, this is the first program of its kind in the nation, and he thinks many other cities will follow suit. He said he anticipates that Garland and McKinney will be the first Texas cities to participate the program, which is expected to deploy in the next couple of months.
Freight Priority is a free service to truckers and fleets traveling through the area. The program uses an app or a truck’s telematics system to connect the vehicle to the cloud, where the GPS location of the vehicle is shared with the EcoDrive app and Smart Priority software and is disseminated to the signal priority system. It works with any high-resolution (1s-5s) automatic vehicle location (AVL) feed from a variety of third-party systems and can be used by freight operators without AVL by using the mobile or dash appliance app, which is still being developed. It does not require any additional hardware on the truck side or the city side.
