- Tallahassee city commissioners voted to apply for a $24 million federal grant to upgrade all 360 stoplights in the city through the U.S. Department of Transportation.
- The upgrades would prevent outages during severe weather and future-proofing for smarter car technology.
- Watch now to hear neighbors react to the possibility.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
One of the many impacts from severe weather you may come across are traffic lights that stop working.
Well, city leaders are looking for the green light to fix that problem.
I'm Alberto Camargo in the downtown Tallahassee neighborhood.
Digging into the tens of millions that could be coming to the Capital City to
revamp part of our infrastructure.
The city of Tallahassee says the negative impacts of malfunctioning stoplights include higher crash probabilities and increases in travel times.
I asked neighbors like Ken Jacobs where they have seen it most often.
"I've seen it around Capital Circle and Centerville where they go out a lot, up in that region. And that causes a traffic mess because people have a problem with four-way stops."
Tallahassee city commissioners made a move to prevent that in the future.
Wednesday they voted to apply for a U.S. Department of Transportation grant of about $24 million.
It's a for a project called "Strengthening Tallahassee with Resilient Traffic Signal Cabinets".
The cost of upgrading the more than 360 traffic signals in the Tallahassee area will cost nearly $30 million.
Local government will make up the difference with a 20% match of about $4.7 million.
The plan is to split that amount between the Florida Department of Transportation, the city of Tallahassee and Leon County.
City traffic manager Josh Hollingsworth says it will make stoplights more resistant to weather effects, will signal boxes twice as large that will include battery backups and better communication systems.
It will make it capable of handling smarter car technology in the future.
"So, we can ensure reliable communications, and reliable operations of our traffic signals. And eventually when we look at these emerging technologies, we have reliable data coming in, and the ability to make changes to our traffic signals based on that data that's reliable and dependable."
Hollingsworth says the new systems would also be upgradeable to allow for self-driving cars to communicate with traffic lights and provide for safer traffic overall.
New tech that is welcomed by Jacobs.
"Smart stoplights sound good. AI is coming into everything so I'm sure they're looking at that and using that to help out as well."
If the city is awarded the grant by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Hollingsworth says the project would take about five years to complete.
In downtown Tallahassee, Alberto Camargo, ABC27.
