FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 14, 2020
MARTA CONGRATULATES PARTNER JURISDICTIONS
ON GEORGIA SMART COMMUNITIES AWARD, WILL ASSIST WITH PROJECTS
Sandy Springs & Clayton County
Will Use Georgia Tech Grant to Study Traffic Patterns
ATLANTA – The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA)
congratulates partner jurisdictions Sandy Springs and Clayton County on winning
the 2020 Georgia Smart Communities Challenge and will assist in conducting
studies on street and sidewalk traffic patterns.
The Georgia Institute of Technology awarded $100,000 in grants to
both Sandy Springs and Clayton County and will provide access to its network of
researchers and engineers to study infrastructure and data projects. MARTA will
lend its support to Sandy Springs as it explores the application of transit
signal priority (TSP) to existing bus service, and to Clayton County as it
looks to make strategic decisions around pedestrian planning.
“MARTA looks forward to partnering with Sandy Springs and Clayton
County on these important studies that use innovative technology to improve
transit service reliability and the walkability of our communities,” said MARTA
General Manager and CEO Jeffrey Parker.
Specifically,
MARTA will work with Sandy
Springs to enable technology on buses that alert an intersection that a bus is
approaching. The intersection determines what action it will take, but the
technology allows the bus to request longer green lights, or shorter red lights
if safely available, when the bus schedule is heavily impacted by traffic. The
project will cover Route 5 on Roswell Road / Johnson Ferry / Hammond Drive with
the goal of improving consistency and reliability of travel times.
MARTA has
experimented with this technology in the past, but this project will pilot a
newer approach that is less hardware-intensive and, if successful, could be
more easily deployed in other corridors.
Clayton County will use the grant money to build a
decision support system for transport project prioritization to promote
mobility and equity, and to identify smart technologies to support walkability
throughout the community. MARTA’s role in this project is still being
discussed.
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