CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — The City of Clarksville is rolling out new LiDAR technology with the hopes of better controlling traffic and safety for pedestrians.
Now through at least the end of the summer, a new mobile unit will be rotated through high-volume intersections. It doesn’t detect license plates; instead, it detects light movement. The technology will look at traffic and pedestrian patterns as well as near-miss crashes.
“You will see that about town. You will see it on Purple Heart Parkway. You will see it on Providence Boulevard, Richview Road and you’ll see it move around,” grants director for the City of Clarksville, Lauren Winters, said. “We have strategically picked places, times of the year [and] times of the day because we want to get a true, good baseline.”
The project is being paid for by a grant that Vanderbilt University received as part of the TNGO Transportation Growth Opportunity. Winters said Austin Peay State University, Tennessee State University and the University of Tennessee Chattanooga have also come into play to help analyze data.
“We also hope with this technology that we can get that starting baseline, we can make improvements to the areas as identified by this technology and then possibly deploy those radars back so we can see, ‘Hey, did our measures that we took— did it work? Did we get it right?’ And if not, we re-group. If it worked, we reproduce,” Winters said.
The information collected will also help determine and prioritize projects in the Mayor’s Transportation 2020+ Project. If things go well, the city could look into long-term LiDAR implementation.
