Where: Colwood, British Columbia, Canada
Product: SPEEDCHECK-MX Vehicle Speed Feedback Signs
Client: City of Colwood
Distributor: ATS Traffic
Colwood’s Sangster Elementary School sits along Metchosin Road, a 50 km/h thoroughfare with two schools in short succession.
British Columbia law dictates reduced speed limits from 8 am to 5 pm in school zones, but playground zones have reduced speeds from dawn to dusk. For Colwood, that meant three different speed zones in less than one kilometer, making the speed zones confusing to follow and challenging to enforce.
To simplify things, the City of Colwood created a single, 800-meter safety corridor that’s active from dawn to dusk. To further protect students and children, the city and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have implemented a traffic calming and speed enforcement program to help lower speeds in this area.
With the recent change in reduced speed times and need for data to inform the new enforcement program, the entrances to the new safety corridor were prime candidates for Carmanah’s first-ever SPEEDCHECK-MX connected Vehicle Speed Feedback Sign installation.
Training the game-changers
Carmanah visited the City of Colwood Engineering and Public Works department to introduce the new SPEEDCHECK-MX to technicians.
Carmanah’s engineering team provided a hands-on demonstration of the SPEEDCHECK-MX and established a plan of where, when, and how to best deploy the solar-powered systems along the safety corridor.
Alongside the physical product training, Colwood technicians learned how to easily set up the connected signs with the MX Field App, create and edit reduced speed schedules with the MX Cloud, and pull driver data using the Traffic Analyzer.
Installation day
To reduce time spent on the busy roadside, the SPEEDCHECK-MX devices and solar panels were pre-installed on poles provided by Carmanah’s regional partner, ATS Traffic. The Colwood Public Works staff also pre-installed cast concrete bases that had a sleeve for the poles to slide into.
The fully assembled poles were transferred to the site to be tilted and dropped into the existing casted bases. Once the poles were erected, solar panels were correctly positioned, and the batteries were installed.
Using the MX Field App, Carmanah’s software engineers helped public works staff to schedule the SPEEDCHECK-MX to run a reduced 30 km/h speed limit from 7 am to 7 pm and a regular 50 km/h speed limit throughout the night.
Informing the speed enforcement program
Using law enforcement alone to correct speeding drivers is costly to any city budget.
Thanks to the MX Cloud, the City of Colwood and the RCMP can now remotely access and download speed management metrics as key performance indicators for the program to inform when and where to deploy expensive speed enforcement resources.
Helpful Resources
>> Learn more about SpeedCheck-MX