California-based developer and manufacturer of advanced traffic control equipment McCain Inc. is celebrating the opening of a Complete Streets project in Los Angeles that has been accomplished using its ATC cabinets.
Now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Austrian Swarco Group, McCain has played a leading role in Los Angeles’s iconic My Figueroa Streetscape Project (MyFig), which has transformed a previously car-dominated community into a pedestrian and bicycle friendly neighborhood. The company supplied 10 of its Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) cabinets to the project, allowing drivers to safely share the corridor with pedestrians and bicyclists.
In June this year, McCain won an order from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) for the world’s largest ATC cabinet deployment. Over the duration of the agreement, the company expects to deliver more than 1,500 cabinets to the city, which it believes is by far the largest ATC cabinet deployment anywhere in the world to date.
LADOT’s MyFig Project was designed to create a multimodal, ‘complete’ street that is accessible and safe for all users. The new McCain ATC cabinets provided the project with unprecedented flexibility to add bicycle lights, pedestrian signals, and detection as appropriate, helping the city move toward its ‘Mobility Plan 2035’ goal of creating a transportation system that balances benefits for all users, irrespective of their choice of travel mode.
The project covers four miles (6.4km) of streets stretching from downtown to south Los Angeles, including Exposition Park, home of the LA Memorial Coliseum. The project’s community enhancements include improved transit and pedestrian access, upgraded signals and signage, protected bicycle lanes, and high-visibility crosswalks. Unlocking the pedestrian and bicycle signalization on 10 very complex intersections required McCain’s heavy-lifting 351 ATC cabinet.
McCain notes that it leads the North American intelligent transportation system (ITS) industry in ATC cabinet technology, with more than five times the deployments of its nearest competitor. Its traffic control cabinets house the computers and sensors that control traffic, pedestrian, and bicycle signal timing to facilitate the efficient and safe movement of people through an intersection.
The previous cabinets in the Figueroa Corridor provided only 16 output channels, whereas the new ATC standard McCain cabinets double that capacity with 32 output channels. They also provide increased safety enhancements for installers and future-proof technology to embrace the connected and autonomous vehicle future. In a separate project, LADOT is using McCain’s smaller profile 357 ATC cabinets to accommodate pedestrian traffic at approximately 30 mid-block crosswalks downtown.
“Making a roadway safer in a city the size of Los Angeles is no small undertaking. Thousands of bikes, buses, cars and pedestrians cross through these intersections every day. Coordinating all of that and making sure it happens safely and efficiently requires the kind of capacity only an ATC cabinet can provide,” explained Reza Roozitalab, McCain’s vice president of hardware engineering.
“The Department understands the immediate and long-term community benefit of ATC technology. LADOT is widely recognized as one of the most progressive departments of transportation in the nation. Through initiatives like ‘Complete Streets’ and ‘Vision Zero’, they’re making walking, biking, and driving safer, and we are thrilled to be part of their plan.”
