Intelligent Transport system to be installed on the new Cooper River bridge

A roughly $16 million Intelligent Transport system being installed on the new Cooper River bridge should help speed traffic flow, knock minutes off emergency response times and add another set of security eyes to the country’s fourth-largest container port.

In several spots along Interstate 26 heading toward Charleston, cable boxes, blossoming with bushels of orange-colored conduits, spring up from portions of the grassy roadside.

Like nerve endings waiting to spark into action, the conduits soon will be filled with fiber optic cables and pulled back underground to provide power to traffic cameras, speed sensors, weather stations and communications systems on a 13-mile section of roadway leading up to and including the new Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge.

The devices are only a portion of the new Cooper River bridge’s Intelligent Transport, or IT, system.

When complete, the $16 million portion of the total $640 million bridge-building package, will include gadgets and tracking devices capable of recording such things as how many vehicles are traveling on the bridge or how many police officers and rescue vehicles need to respond to a crash.

The system’s underlying purpose is to inform drivers to the conditions almost instantaneously.

“This is not like digging a ditch and putting in a light post,” said Jerry Eddins with Grant Contracting Inc. “Setting up this system is just like setting up the computer network in your office, only instead of deciding which guy’s computer needs access to which printer, the (state Department of Transportation) tells us they want to be able to see every inch of that bridge with these cameras.”

Accomplishing this task means having 1,200 miles of fiber optic cable in place by the time the concrete is poured for the bridge’s roadway. The roadbed should be set by the summer of 2005.

When complete, two conduits, each 33,000 feet long, will run side by side from the IT system’s headquarters on Fain Street off Aviation Avenue in North Charleston along the eastern edge of I-26 and across the new bridge. One line will be filled with the fiber optic cables necessary to run the IT system, and the other conduit will lie dormant for future use.

The conduit system, minus what will be installed on the new bridge itself, is in place from Fain Street to the intersection of Meeting Street and Morrison Drive.

Workers now are installing the 1,200 miles of fiber optic cable using a machine that blows one mile of cable a day through the conduit with a high-power stream of air. This should be complete by the end of September, Eddins said.

The complete Intelligent Transport system includes:

— Four changeable, overhead message signs capable of running 60 characters of text that will alert drivers to weather and traffic conditions on the bridge. They will be located on I-26, the Crosstown in downtown Charleston, and Coleman and Johnnie Dodds boulevards in Mount Pleasant. The boards will be the same as those in place on the Don N. Holt Jr. Bridge on Interstate 526 and the one hanging above I-26 between the Montague Avenue and Dorchester Road exits.

“If there is a major accident on the bridge, we will already have the appropriate message programmed in,” said Bobby Clair Jr., special project engineer with the state DOT. “Drivers will not have to be so delayed, and people will not have to worry so much that someone they know is stuck in traffic.”

— Twelve high-resolution cameras will be strategically placed to view every portion of roadway. They will have 360-degree visibility, with a viewing range of 2,500 feet.

“They will be able to read a license plate number from half a mile away,” Eddins said.

By law, however, they cannot use the technology to issue tickets or track down a driver through his or her driver’s license number.

The city of Charleston has operated four cameras on the Silas N. Pearman Bridge since 1992 and one on its approach.

Lt. Mikel Benton, a member of the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office since 1988, remembers the old days “when you had to drive and actually find the (accident ) location on a highway. Now, we look at the cameras and know exactly where it is,” he said.

Police forces also do not waste manpower sending more officers than necessary, he said.

“We can see if an accident is just a fender bender. Then we know to send a tow truck, not a bunch of officers,” Benton said.

The cameras’ images will feed into the system’s main hub on Fain Street in North Charleston as well as existing viewing areas used by local law enforcement authorities in Charleston, Mount Pleasant and Charleston County. The cameras will bring the total number of traffic cameras in the state to 172. The state DOT also will have viewing access from its technology hub in Columbia.

— Fourteen radar sensors are designed to track traffic volume, the average speed of traffic and the size of vehicles in each lane. For example, in the event of a traffic accident, the radar sensors will detect a lull in the traffic speed and set off an alarm in the control stations.

They can also be used to indicate when authorities need to change traffic patterns.

“If too many container trucks are using the new bridge, the radar will tell us,” Eddins said. “Then we’ll know if we should change the signage so the trucks start using Interstate 526,” an alternate route for trucks to reach the State Ports Authority.

— Two island surveillance cameras will be attached underneath the bridge, pointing toward the base of the bridge’s two, diamond-shaped towers to monitor marine traffic near the bridge, sounding an alarm if a boat gets too close to the towers. In the wake of Sept. 11, this is an additional security measure for the bridge and the port, Eddins said.

“We don’t want anyone driving up in the middle of the night and putting a bomb somewhere,” he said.

— Two 10-by-10-foot weather stations will collect information on rain, fog, humidity, wind speed and wind direction. Twenty similar sites are located in the state, said Mark Hanna, assistant state maintenance engineer with the DOT. Most are in the Upstate because of the region’s tendency to get rain and snowfall, but the height of the new Cooper River bridge — the roadway is 200 feet high — necessitates wind-tracking devices, for example, in case conditions reach a point when the bridge should be closed. One station will be placed on Interstate 526 and the other at the base of the bridge next to I-26.

“With a bridge like this, it will tend to freeze because of the wind,” Hanna said. “The system will let us know if this is happening and the bridge needs to be closed.”

— Sensors located just beneath the roadway will indicate road conditions such as temperature, giving early indications if the roadway is icing and needs to be sanded to prevent vehicles from slipping.

— Two communication systems located inside the diamond-shaped towers will give workers in the towers access to phones, computers and a direct line of communication to the hub in North Charleston.

— The concrete hub building on Fain Street in North Charleston will be upgraded to include television screens and monitoring equipment.

The new system should be a huge improvement over the current situation, officials said, when traffic often backs up for miles at the slightest wreck on the John P. Grace or Silas N. Pearman bridges.

Since January 2000, police have responded to 305 accidents on both bridges, 32 so far this year, according to the S.C. Department of Public Safety.

Once the new system is in place, weather and traffic conditions will be displayed on electronic message boards almost instantaneously.

“The (IT) system will keep traffic moving along,” Eddins said.