This past weekend we had 9 confirmed wrong way events.
Extremely shocked.
You're dealing with two vehicles going high speed at each other head on.
In most cases, especially highway speeds, that's not survivable.
In the early morning hours on May 6th, we had a tragic incident. State Police Trooper Kevin Trainor died in the line of duty on May 6th. He was struck head on by a wrong way driver on Route 1.
Trying to prevent greater tragedy, put himself in harm's way, and unfortunately both the operator and the trooper passed away. That immediately spurred our governor to reach out to our administration and say we have to do more, we have to be better.
I want every resource, every tool, every technology deployed used here in Massachusetts on our roadways to prevent and stop wrong way driving.
More people are driving in the wrong way than I think any of us were aware of now that we have the footage.
I knew wrong way was an issue. I never realized how large of an issue it was.
A lot of our ramps were built and designed from 1950s, where you've got side by side on and off ramps, and that's where the driver confusion tends to happen. The governor came to us and asked us to do whatever we could to accelerate our installation of wrong way technology so that we could try to prevent some of these crashes.
We had our first meeting at 8:30 in the morning. Then we went through first testing on Monday, June 15th, and we were fully operational with that first system, and we just kept rolling from there.
We committed to a very aggressive timeline out of respect for the trooper who lost his life.
We did a lot of nights and weekends, myself included, as well as the whole team and really work together to come up with some solutions.
We're leveraging our existing infrastructure that's out there.
We're leveraging some new technology that's being provided and it really gives us a system that we can install quickly and way more locations than we had originally, planning now hundreds versus what we were looking at.
So we mount thermal imaging sensors up on existing traffic master arms pointing at the roadway, detecting vehicles traveling the wrong way, and that's interfacing to Applied Information's field monitoring unit integrated to a warning sign.
They drive through two virtual detection zones. When driver hits detection zone one, that sets the system.
The minute the vehicle hits a second detection zone, it activates the system to activate warning beacon signs. These newer signs are backlit so they're a little more visible knowing that a lot of our wrong way instances are happening at night.
It is a video clip that's made of the driver going the wrong direction. An e-mail and text message and an audible alarm is sent to the Mass State Police, MassDOT, HOC. It sends out a signal to our staff here at the highway operation center as well as state police. It allows us to react to it much, much faster. We're no longer relying on somebody to call 911.
We get an alert right away that we can take action on. Luckily we have seen a lot of self correction. Which means they realize they made a mistake, they see the flashing sign, they turn around on the ramp and they go up the right way up the ramp.
All systems are great, but you need to test to verify they work.
All right, coming over the bridge, let the AI guys know I have the travel safety app open. Got it. See blinkies.
We're investing a lot in the equipment and want to follow through with the time to make sure that they're working properly.
This is a much more cost effective custom solution that VHB has supported MassDOT in coming up with AI and our other vendors.
We can send those alerts not only to our operations center into the state police, but that can be pushed out to mapping companies such as Waze. It can be pushed into connected vehicles.
Every driver in that corridor that's maybe going towards that wrong way driver is going to get an alert on their dashboard so they know to slow down and be vigilant.
Every life you can save by getting earlier detection is worth it.
I think right now we're both the fastest in the country as far as the rate of deployment, where we're using the best cutting edge technology available.
And my expectation is that we're going to have the best system in the United States.