Colorado Springs receives $1.7 million grant to improve traffic safety

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) -- The City of Colorado Springs has earned a SMART Grants Program award for $1.7 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The city said the grant will fund the Engineering Division’s plans to strategize, prototype, and test next-generation traffic management tools at approximately 50 City intersections with traffic signals. The traffic management tools include radar and light-detecting and ranging technologies (LiDAR) to perceive vehicle position, size, and speed of vehicles entering and exiting intersections and to capture the position of non-motorized users at intersections.

Other tools will include continuous traffic counters that monitor traffic volumes and calibrate traffic modeling efforts.

According to the city, the potential application of these tools includes signal timing optimization based on vehicle size and conditions; incident detection and reporting within intersections; queue clearing to accommodate emergency vehicles; transit optimization; extended crossing time for pedestrians, and bicycle detection.

Colorado Springs was one of only 59 grant award recipients across the country.

The city said the SMART Grants Program funds projects aimed at using technological interventions to solve real-world challenges faced by local communities.