Big Sister Is Watching

Despite the overnight snowfall and a route through some of the metro’s most notorious traffic hot spots, I pulled into the well-salted parking lot almost fifteen minutes early for my appointment to look at the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s new Roseville compound. It’s a brushed aluminum affair, called the Water’s Edge building. Together with the attached Operations Center, the facility looks spanking modern indeed, especially standing abreast of the aging Rosedale Shopping Center just across Snelling Avenue.

Mary Meinert, a traffic information officer and occasional tour guide, greeted me with an enormous cup of coffee in hand. Arriving as early as 5:30 a.m. some days and leaving as late as 8 p.m. others, she counts java second only to her ID badge as a workplace necessity. After I was fitted with a visitor’s badge, she took me to the Operations Center to show me exactly why my rush-hour drive had been so efficient. In the tour room, Meinert projected a computer display onto a large screen, made selections from a network of more than two hundred live-feed cameras, and toggled the cameras to show me, in real time, the route I had just driven from Highway 100 to I-394 to I-94 to the Lowry Tunnel, to 35W to Highway 36. “People were pretty well behaved today,” she said with the tone of a satisfied preschool teacher. She expertly panned a camera to check on a stalled car I had passed on I-94 just twenty minutes before. “You are Big Brother,” I accused. “You can call me Big Sister,” she quipped.

If there is a place where Minnesotans need some babysitting, the highways are certainly it. Pretty much everyone knows anecdotally about our atrocious driving. Last January the Minnesota Department of Public Safety released statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirming that Minnesotans drive like, well, morons. Minnesotans crash and die more often per mile than the national average, comparing favorably to only a handful of retrograde states, such as Mississippi. In 2002, there were 94,969 crashes reported in the state, fifty-nine percent of them concentrated in the metro. These crashes yield nearly seven hundred fatalities annually. This particular morning two Anokans had perished on Highway 10.

To shepherd the metro’s endangered commuters, Mn/DOT completed the new facility last February. Meinert admits that they didn’t publicize the opening aggressively; the political climate hasn’t exactly been ripe for an announcement that we’ve spent $23.5 million on a fifty-three-thousand-square-foot facility just to help folks drive around. I was, in fact, the first journalist allowed to prowl the floor of the Traffic Operations Group. It’s an impressive room, right out of Hollywood’s imagination of such places. Three banks of thirty screens each monitor more than two hundred locations on 170 miles of metro highway. The top row of each bank keeps accident sites locked onscreen, while the rest scroll through various camera angles and locations, monitoring rush-hour progress. At an array of a dozen or so desks, Mn/DOT dispatchers and state troopers watch the screens and keep track of other data streams, from electronic in-road traffic counters (called loops) to air patrols. Unlike the CIA, Mn/DOT has a pretty good idea what to do with the information: They adjust ramp meters, post messages on changeable signs, and dispatch help where needed. (Alas, they are powerless to rid the world of its most disturbing and intractable evil—the gawker slow-down.)

None of this can be done on the cheap. System architecture design supervisor Terry Haukom sat down with me to defend some of the gadgets he clearly loves. “A changeable message board costs about $60,000,” he said, “and to the average guy that sounds like a lot of money.” But the average cost of a crash is now close to $20,000, said Haukom. “If we can prevent just three secondary crashes, we’ve made our money back. And I expect to get twenty years out of each sign.”

Since this is all about safety, I asked Haukom about the new microwave technology being installed for traffic counting. I wanted to know if this is roasting drivers. He patiently explained that “microwave” can refer to any radio-wave signal frequency in the gigahertz range. “Your radar detector will go off. But you won’t be able to heat up your sandwich.”

With all these devices at the ready to spot trouble, I wondered if Mn/DOT plans to roll out the heavy artillery for the notorious New Year’s Eve commute, which, after all, will be an hour later and an hour drunker this year. As it happens, they’ll leave on the lights, but Mn/DOT staff will turn night operations over to the State Patrol, just like any other night. Operations manager Nick Thompson apparently doesn’t relish the thought of driving home in the wee hours himself. “We hope to be out of here by about 8:30.” Besides, the morning commute often supplies more entertainment anyway. “Up on 169 for the last few weeks we’ve seen a pig,” said Meinert. “People would call on their cell phones and tell us they saw something.” Eventually, she said, “they had to shoot him.”
—Joe Pastoor


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