Improving safety on the roads: UT Traffic Signal Academy trains future operators across the state and the country
In Knox County, there are 91 traffic signals. The city of Knoxville has 400. Memphis has about 1,400 and New York has around 14,000. Each of those signals requires a trained professional to keep it working properly.
“Imagine the number of people you need just to maintain all that infrastructure, right? And they need to be trained,” said Airton Kohls, a research associate professor at the University of Tennessee’s Center for Transportation Research (CTR).
“All we pay attention is to the light, right? But there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes,” Kohls said. “The only time you notice signals is when they’re not working or when you’re sitting late at night trying to go to the grocery store and you’re waiting there for 25 seconds and you don’t see anybody else crossing and then you go like, ‘What’s going on?”
But not Kohls. He has spent his career understanding how traffic signals function both here in the United States and in his home country.
“I’m originally from Brazil, so I graduated here from UT in 1991, went back to Brazil, worked for 10 years there, and then got my master’s and my PhD also here at UT,” he explained.
His career path has centered around traffic signals for decades.
“I wrote my dissertation regarding traffic signals,” Kohls recalled. “Also when I was in Brazil working for the city, I worked with traffic signals, but it’s a total different system. I worked with transportation down there as well.”
After returning to Knoxville, Kohls helped create the Traffic Signal Academy at the university’s CTR.
“The thing that I think was interesting was seeing that there was a need for agencies here in Tennessee,” he said.
Kohls traveled across the state — from Chattanooga to Nashville to Memphis — to assess what was needed.
“We learned that several agencies didn’t have the personnel to even maintain the signals, so we decided, ‘OK, let’s help Tennessee,’” he explained.
Kohls said the biggest challenge for these agencies is a lack of funding.
“There are places here in Tennessee, I think it’s under $150,000 to $200,000 per intersection, alright, just to instrument all the infrastructure: the cabling, the mast arms and everything,” he detailed. “There are other parts in the country that are already reaching $500,000, so if you think an agency has, I don’t know, 100, 200, 300 signals, think of the amount of infrastructure that they have just on the signal side, right? Then they have to have components. We have crashes, right, that take down a cabinet. They have to have components to go there and fix it, right? So there’s a lot.”
Since launching the academy in 2012, Kohls said it has reached a national audience.
“We started getting people from all over the country, so we had probably more than 25 to 30 states that have come to the class,” Kohls shared. “More than 3,000 students since 2012 have participated in the class.”
He says he’s been to Orlando, Alabama and Kansas City just to name a few locations, teaching to students across the country. No matter the location, however, Kohls says safety is at the heart of every lesson.
“I am with my family in my car, with my two kids in the back of the car,” Kohls proposed the routine many community members go through daily. “As I go through the intersection, I am trusting somebody to have done their job right, to have timed that signal correctly, especially the yellow and the red clearances, and to make sure that the intersection is safe, right, for my family to go through it, to drive through it and navigate that intersection safely.”
To do that, Kohls said they focus on their approach aiming for continued improvement.
“We start with research, right? We go out there, we find out what the need is, what the problem is, and then we bring that problem,” Kohls explained. “We bring the data in and start looking at that and say, ‘How can I fix it?’ Right? Or, ‘How can I make things better?’ And that’s what brings the technology and makes the technology involved. And then we have the users. We always have to think about the users, the citizens first.”
When all of those factors are studied, considered and understood, Kohl said safety improves — even to the point of potentially achieving Knoxville and Knox County’s goal of zero traffic-related deaths by 2040, known as Vision Zero.
“Probably right now we can say, ‘Well, there’s no way we’re going to hit zero,” Kohls said. “I think we will. We have the means to do it, but it’s piece by piece, right?”
It’s why Kohls is putting together those pieces — “training, understanding the equipment, understanding the data, making sure that we have research on how to make things better” — and passing it on to people across the state.
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