City fire apparatus responding to emergency calls will encounter only green lights soon, thanks to a grant which funded devices capable of overriding the normal traffic signal patterns at key intersections.
Fire Chief Mary Regan said in September, 2011, that she had applied for a $10,000 grant offered by the insurance arm of the Massachusetts Municipal Association to fund the purchase of eight of the $1,200 devices.
She said at the time that the Opticom devices use a sensor attached to traffic lights to recognize an infrared emitter installed on the light bar of an emergency vehicle to automatically show a red signal for opposing traffic and show a green signal to an approaching emergency vehicle, to allow for a quicker transit of an intersection.
A manual override switch is available, she said, to turn off the device so traffic is not snarled if, for example, an ambulance arrives at an accident scene at an intersection with a traffic light.
Regan said that not all the traffic signals in the city are equipped to recognize the Opticom device but that the newer ones are.
Since most of the lights in the downtown area have been upgraded as part of the two highway projects which have been underway in the city for the past three years ,those lights will recognize the devices immediately and Regan said that the older signals which do not will be identified so that they can be upgraded as time goes on.
“It’s going to make it a little bit safer for us going through intersections” she said and explained that the devices will communicate with traffic signals before the apparatus arrives at an intersection so it will be cleared before the fire department vehicles get to the intersection.
“It’s going to be safer for people driving through” she said because the equipment “starts to change a light before they (firefighters) get to the intersection so the flow keeps moving.”
She said that there have not previously been major accidents involving fire department vehicles in intersections but said “we have had a few fenderbenders but it’s more of a delay” and said that apparatus with the new devices “won’t be stopped in traffic.”
The grant was approved and accepted by the city’s fire commission at their November meeting and Regan said that the devices have arrived and are being installed now on the four ambulances based at the headquarters, as well as the two pumper trucks based there, the platform truck and the deputy chief’s vehicle.
Since those vehicles respond from the Broad Street headquarters and thus always have to transit several intersections controlled by traffic lights in the downtown area of the city, they have the priority for the devices over the vehicles which respond to alarms from the two outlying substations were there are fewer traffic lights.
