The Challenge

The Scarborough Integrated Transport Scheme (SITS) includes 4Km of the southern approach to Scarborough plus two new Park and Ride (P&R) sites.  As part of SITS new traffic signal installations and Puffin crossings were to be installed and existing installations and crossings refurbished or modified by Peek Traffic Ltd. The existing fixed time UTC system was also upgraded by Peek to incorporate SCOOT UTC. The new and refurbished traffic signals and mid block crossings needed to be connected to the UTC system to support full or part time UTC operation or remote monitoring as required. A further consideration was the planned future deployment of a UTMC system that would include car park counters, variable message signs, Strategy Supervisor etc and which would need to seamlessly fit in with the communications network implemented in Phase 1 for the traffic signals.

 

The Solution

IDT won the commission from Scarborough Borough Council (SBC) to design a wide area network scheme, the first phase of which would be the implementation of a mesh radio network linking Peek PTC-1 units installed at each traffic signal-controlled junction with the UTC instation.

 

The Outcome

The first phase was completed to programme and budget and has worked reliabily since Spring 2008. Over 20 junctions have been iMesh-enabled so far and the performance of the system is meeting SBC's expectations. The success of the system has given SBC confidence to expand the system to cover new Park and Ride sites.

Although the traffic signal network in Scarborough is UTMC compliant, it is interesting to note that the system, when installed, did not have a UTMC common database.  This is another example of the flexibility of UTMC; the common database was installed during a subsequent phase of works.