Somewhere, the system to speed up traffic took a left turn

Your car sits at rush hour in a left-turn lane – it could be at any of hundreds of intersections – and you fume until you fi­nally get a turn arrow. You advance two car lengths, get a red, and wait for the next cycle. And then the next. And you ponder why “they” can’t mesh signals with the traffic.

Finally you turn left, only to discover that the traffic you’ve entered crawls at a snail’s pace because at every red light, lanes full of cars idle as only a few cars arrive to use a too-long turn interval. Why can’t “they” time the signals to match the traffic flow?

Welcome to the wonderful world of Miami-Dade motoring, where traffic mounts daily yet the commuting gods seem oblivious to our calls to figure out how to coordinate up-to-the-minute traffic knowledge with the timing of all 3,000 county signals that control the flow.

But the county’s traffic authorities are far from oblivious. They have a plan to get the traffic flowing better. It’s coming soon. And it has been coming soon for 20 years.

It turns out that doing what seems so obvious – match the traffic signals with the actual traffic in real time – takes far longer in geographically widespread Miami-Dade than the wait in that left-turn lane at rush hour.

So when Miami Today reported last week that the first of 3,000 new traffic signal controllers are set, at least tentatively, to be deployed for use in mid-May, we cheered the news after so many years, but we celebrated with the knowledge that all 3,000 have to be deployed, tested, and linked before we can hope to see all the traffic on county-controlled roadways coordinated.

Even then, what happens to coordinate the flow on county-controlled thoroughfares with roads the county doesn’t control, ranging from the expressways and state roads to the roadways overseen by our 34 cities, towns and villages? It’s not easy when our traffic gurus aren’t all on the same payroll.

“Everyone needs to remember that traffic signal synchronization and coordination began in Miami-Dade County in the late 1970s – 1976,” Frank Aira, chief operations and maintenance officer at the county’s traffic management center, told us last week.

But the data and timing parameters on roads throughout the county that were established in the 1970s, Mr. Aira noted, might not mesh with widened streets, changed corners and other realities in the traffic flows of 2026. In this fast-changing community, how could they possibly be the same?

In the 1970s method, some work to synchronize traffic lights had to be done manually and was limited to 2,000 signals.

So in 2006 the county began to develop what’s called an Advanced Traffic Management System. Such systems continuously monitor traffic and waiting lanes for things like turns to adjust signal timing to minimize delays. The systems integrate technology, sensors and real-time data to make trips faster and safer.

Some of those systems can adjust maximum speed limits in real time, based on traffic density, weather and other conditions, to reduce stop-and-go flows, though nobody is talking publicly about using our system to do that. Shouldn’t that be on the table too?

Work to replace the more rudimentary traffic signal controls of the 1970s began in 2006. In a county meeting in 2007, one commissioner asked to accelerate the development that had already begun for the Advanced Traffic Management System. His plan was to move the completion date up to 2008.

We didn’t make the deadline then, and we still haven’t. It’s like we’re caught in never-ending left-turn traffic.

The county first began testing a handful of adaptive traffic signals on Northwest 36th Street in a 13-block stretch a decade ago, in 2016. Equipped with cameras, they were programmed to automatically change signal timing to improve traffic flows and reprogram their own timing to meet changing conditions. But those 13 short blocks on one street didn’t coordinate with traffic anywhere else.

In 2021, the county decided to update the outdated work done to date by contracting with a German firm, Yunex Traffic. By 2023, the county had terminated that contract due to what it called “missed deadlines and performance issues.”

In 2024, the county turned to a Hialeah firm, Horsepower Electric, in a $200 million deal to finally link all 3,000 county traffic signals in a ten-year effort, at a pace of 500 signals a year.

Last year, the county said it aimed to deploy the first of the controllers by March of this year. And in March, Mr. Aira told us the hope was to do so by mid-May as the country tries to understand the impact of the update, such as whether it can be done remotely and what the cost would be to the county if physical action were required at every intersection – which was a major weakness of the 1976 version.

As the county now works with the main traffic control system back at its headquarters and assesses what the software being put in place will actually do in the rollout of signal controllers across the county, the lesson learned in this exercise in traffic speed-up is that everything takes longer in the complex process than was apparent two decades ago when the upgrade was envisioned.

It feels a lot – too much – like sitting in that left-turn lane waiting for the arrow to finally turn green.