New Program To Smooth Traffic Flow on Ygnacio Valley Road

Three lanes screaming in each direction, tailgaters pushing their luck, and whoa … whoa … woe betide the driver who tries to text. 

I'm describing Ygnacio Valley Road in commute hours.

The road has been described as:

• The spine of Walnut Creek;
• The road to everywhere;
• A freeway with stoplights.

The congestion is about to get "5, 10, 15 percent better," said Rafat Raie, traffic engineer for the Walnut Creek Public Services Department. Most drivers won't even notice there has been a change. They notice when something goes wrong, Raie said.

The city traffic team is doing last tests on software and new equipment that will time the lights to account for patterns of use eastbound and westbound.

In a small windowless room in the second floor of City Hall — the traffic operations room — members of the traffic team go in and check the computers and the feeds from nine cameras showing real-time traffic patterns at YVR intersections.

"We're running the program in the background, testing it," said Raie. "Once it's perfected, we'll let it take over." He estimates that will be in a month. The program will have manual overrides from the traffic operations room for those little traffic mishaps every day that alter the flow.

Raie said the program will make real-time adjustments as the heavy flow alternates between eastbound-heavy (toward the east county cities of Concord, Clayton and Pittsburg) and westbound-heavy (toward Interstate 680) several times in the course of an hour. The computers will adjust the timing of lights to even out the flow.

The program will adjust, for instance, to different timing on Wednesday mornings for the advance green, left-turn green arrow on Walnut Boulevard; on Wednesday, Walnut Creek Intermediate starts school a little later than other days.

The flow has different patterns the day before a holiday and the day after a holiday.

The new software and equipment was financed in part by a grant the city received from Measure B sales tax money for transportation. The equipment measures traffic flow 24 hours a day.