Southern California’s Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) has awarded a $4.5 million contract for a regional smart mobility, safety and sustainability programme to mobility infrastructure specialist Iteris. Orange County is the third most populous county in the State of California, and the sixth in the United States.

OCTA’s three-year regional traffic signal synchronisation project with Iteris is designed to further the county’s goals to significantly reduce countywide travel time, fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, while improving safety and mobility, and overall travel experience for all road users, including vehicles, buses, bicycles and pedestrians. By reducing delays and stops on key corridors for passenger vehicles and heavy vehicles, the project will help reduce CO2 emissions and fuel consumption, which in turn will contribute to sustainable environmental and air quality improvements.

Since launch, OCTA’s traffic signal synchronisation programme has already resulted in a 13% reduction in travel time, a 14% improvement in travel speed, a 52-million-gallon reduction in fuel consumption and a 885 million pound reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the three-year project agreement, Iteris will upgrade traffic signal communications network and intelligent transportation system (ITS) devices, as well as provide signal timing and coordination services that will improve traffic flow, enhance public safety and decrease stops along Warner Avenue, a major east-west corridor that comprises key signalised intersections spanning three cities – Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley and Santa Ana – in Orange County, California.

The new agreement with OCTA follows contract awards totaling $8.3 million to perform the same traffic signal synchronisation services for OCTA, announced in 2020, across Orange County’s Main Street and Katella Avenue corridors.

As part of the two-year operations and maintenance phase of the programme, Iteris will deliver its recently launched congestion management service for intersections and arterials to augment OCTA’s traffic management operations on an ongoing basis. This offer bundles Iteris’ expertise and resources with the signal performance measures (SPM) and arterial performance measures (APM) features of Iteris’ ClearGuide SaaS-based mobility intelligence solution. With ClearGuide SPM, Iteris experts can monitor the health and safety of intersections, streamline their analysis through configurable alerts, and identify and prioritise optimisations without visiting the field. With ClearGuide APM, the project team can monitor arterial travel times and reliability, prioritise retiming efforts, identify congestion hotspots and understand how highway traffic impacts surrounding arterials. These activities will allow Iteris to proactively maintain optimum signal timing performance.

Earlier in 2021, Iteris announced that the City of Lake Forest, the Pulice-FNF-Flatiron Joint Venture and the OC 405 Partners Joint Venture had selected Iteris’ congestion management service to augment their traffic management operations to reduce congestion and improve safety.

“We are proud to continue to support OCTA’s goal of improving the safety, mobility and sustainability of Orange County road users by embarking on this traffic signal synchronisation project,” said Scott Carlson, vice president, Alternative Delivery at Iteris. “This initiative represents the continued expansion of Iteris’ specialised consulting services, SaaS solutions and cloud-enabled managed services across the west coast, and will ultimately help to increase the value, effectiveness and resilience of the region’s existing transportation infrastructure, while also improving air quality and reducing fuel consumption.”