BROOKINGS – A new apparatus shaped like a metal bell has attracted some attention. The equipment atop the southeast lightpole at the corner of Eighth Street South and Seventh Avenue South is a camera to regulate the flow of traffic, said Lyle Reed, maintenance electrician with Brookings Municipal Utilities.
“This is the first one in the whole city,” he said.
“It’s what’s called a fish-eye camera, so one camera sees the entire intersection,” Reed said, adding it’s for detection of vehicles at the intersection.
“(The light at) Eighth Street South stays green east and west unless there’s a car approaching it on Seventh Avenue,” Reed said, adding the presence of vehicles will activate the signal life cycle and change the lights, allowing the vehicles to proceed through the intersection.
The camera replaces equipment that could be a little hard for Brookings crews to maintain, especially in the winter, Reed said.
“This intersection, like all other intersections in town, was originally built with what we call loops in the street; they’re under the pavement,” Reed said.
The loops, like the camera, sense approaching traffic and change the lights, but construction forced BMU to find another way.
“That intersection is going to get some work done on it very, very shortly. They’re going to be re-doing all the concrete ramps, the pedestrian ramps that go into the four corners and then cutting out some of the curbs,” Reed said.
“They discovered that all of the existing signal light loop wires went through those curbs that are going to be torn out, so we had to make a decision on what to do,” Reed said.
Volga has the same camera set up on the intersection near the soybean plant, so Brookings decided to try the same system.
“It was a perfect situation where we needed an answer fairly quick and we were familiar with this and knew that existed and other people had tried it. So we decided to use this one,” Reed said.
They could have replaced the loops, but South Dakota weather and frozen ground make repairs a little tricky.
“Loops under the ground in our climate doesn’t work well for repairing them,” Reed said.
When crews do milling and overlay work, “they’ll cut the loops out with those machines and they have to be replaced,” he said. “When the loops go bad, we can’t fix them in the wintertime and then we have to modify the intersection.
“(The camera is) accessible all the time. Something happens to it, it’s right there, we can replace it if necessary,” Reed said.
So far it’s working well. Reed said it was still to be determined whether the camera will be installed at other intersections.
“It’s new to us, too, but we were very pleased with it,” Reed said. “We’ll see how our experience goes here.”
Contact Jodelle Greiner at jgreiner@brookingsregister.com.
