By Jason Islas
Lookout Staff

November 11, 2011 -- Have you ever sat and waited what seemed an eternity for the red light to change? If it was due to a technical hitch, Santa Monica traffic officials can now fix it with the flick of a switch.

The City's new Traffic Management Center, which celebrated its grand opening Thursday, will provide a hub for integrated traffic control. Inside a small room on the southwest edge of City Hall, traffic officials will monitor a wall of screens beaming statistics and footage from more than 30 signals.

“The best way to describe this is mission control,” City Traffic Engineer Sam Morrissey told The Lookout at Thursday's opening. From the Center, “we can program signals for special events and comprehensively respond to traffic.

“This is giving us a good foundation to handle the upcoming construction activity,” he said.

Eventually all signalized intersections in Santa Monica will be linked to the Traffic Management Center, said Transportation Engineer Andrew Maximous.

“We're in the beginning stages,” Maximous said. But the integrated system will help us “take care of the buses, the bicyclists and the motorists."

Commuters may have already noticed cameras on many of the signal lights downtown. Those cameras feed directly to the new center but do not record footage.

The cameras will in fact replace the “inductive loop” detection system that currently alerts traffic officials that a car is waiting for the light to change.

Unlike the inductive loop system, the cameras can pick up bicyclists at signal lights as easily as it can pick up a car, Maximous said.

Though the cameras are initially more expensive than the loops – about $25,000 per intersection, they don't need to be replaced every time the street is resurfaced, Morrissey said.

Staff at the Traffic Management Center can do more than just monitor the change of lights and flow of traffic, officials said.

The centralized system allows for staff to adjust the traffic light intervals and make other adjustments directly from the Center. In the past, if a green light need to be changed, staff would have to drive to the intersection and make the change there, Morrissey said,

With the cameras in place, staff can also take a preliminary look at any reported problems before they head out into the field, he said.

Downtown Santa Monica already is connected to the Center via the underground fiber optic network.

Maximous says that by the end of 2012, the Mid-City areas and Arizona Avenue will be connected to the system and by the end of 2013, all the signalized intersections in Santa Monica will also be linked.