ORLANDO, Fla. — In this week’s Traffic Inbox, we fielded a question from Meredith Romano, who has to do a lot of travelling this upcoming Labor Day weekend.
- Florida Turnpike Enterprise gearing up for Labor Day weekend
- Fla. Turnpike operations monitor traffic cameras 24 hours/day
- Officials expecting a 20-25 percent increase in certain areas
- More Traffic Inbox coverage
She wants to know not only how the dynamic signs along the major roads are updated but where it happens as well. She relies on information like that every time she has a long commute.
For this week’s answer, we visited the Operations Center at Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise, which is located at the Turkey Lake Service Plaza off of the Turnpike in Orlando.
Officials are constantly monitoring hundreds of cameras 24 hours a day, and they allowed us to have a peak behind the scenes.
The Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise is gearing up for one of the busiest travel holidays of the year, and they will be closely monitoring several of the area’s major interchanges.
“The 408/Turnpike interchange, the I-4/Turnpike interchange, the I-75/Turnpike interchange specifically,” said Kelly Kinney, TMC Manager at Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise.
She continued, “And we have our Leesburg Mainline Toll Plaza in the Lake County area. We watch these spots, we monitor for congestion. There are several notification sources we can get for congestion occurring.”
So exactly how much extra congestion can we expect?
“We are expecting a 20-25 percent increase in certain areas,” Kinney said.
There are a lot of ways that a center like this can react to any incidents that happen, like updating the Florida 511 website and transmitting highway advisory radio messages.
And those dynamic signs you see on the Turnpike? Those can be changed in seconds.
“A lot of it is through an automated response system through our software,” Kinney said. “So when we put certain conditions in the software, it allows the operator to quickly activate the appropriate signs in the appropriate area.”
We saw that plan of action as a portion of the Turnpike was shut down that day and getting ready to reopen.
For those of you making a long commute this weekend, rest assured there are always people watching in case something unexpected happens.
“Best advice to give to holiday motorists or really any time is to insure they are not distracted while they are driving,” said Kinney. “We have a primary law now banning the use of mobile devices. And then also we implore drivers to move over for our emergency responders, including our road ranger patrols. Slow down and move over for their safety on scene.”
If you have a traffic question or problem that you want looked at or solved, head to mynews13.com/trafficinbox and fill out the simple form.