The City of Tacoma deploy the first VATCS to hit the USA west coast in a commitment to providing safer roads for their community. The City laid down the criteria of Innovation, Education and Independently proven Long term effectiveness and the Posted speed limit VATCS met this remit where other more common speed feed back type signs could not.

The city is utilising the permanent install of the technology in attaining better adherence to the posted speed limit. Single diagram posted speed limit VATCS are being used at site locations where historic data has indicated a speeding concern in the zone.

The City has targeted the flexibility of the dual diagram VATCS signs to help re-enforce the lower speed limits in force during the peak operation times within school zones with the aim of improving overall safety for students and school staff. The dual diagram sign has the ability to display both the lower and higher speeds automatically via an uploaded timetable to coincide with the school operating hours.

Spencer Beier traffic engineer for the city was quoted as saying ‘ Good traffic calming policy is based on educating and providing clear and reasonable guidance to the driver and the VATCS are independently proven to meet this goal by retaining drivers respect for the long term.

The introduction of the VATCS technology has not only achieved the safety goal of speed reduction which has been evident from the initial install short term speed data log analysis, see extract of analysis at Tyler Street below.

Further to the first introduction of the VATCS technology on the west coast in the City of Tacoma W , word of the technology is spreading fast not only through the state with Clark County and the City of Redmond investing in the innovative traffic calming product to replace the dated speed feedback technology.

In addition to this good news Dorman Varitext are happy to be able to announce a breakthrough into California where the City of Redwood will be trialling the dual warning/posted speed limit model in an attempt to tackle excessive approach speeds in advance of a pedestrian crosswalk.

Due to the performance and positive feedback for the technology the City of Tacoma have also doubled their deployment  from the initial 14 signs to 28 in a drive towards safer roads for all communities within the city limits.

City of Tacoma Speed data Analysis

On Tyler Street (30 mph speed limit), the comparison between Covert and Active modes provided short term feedback as follows

The percentage of vehicles traveling...  
0-5 mph (over the speed limit) went from 42.7% to about 39%
5-10 mph went from 27.9% to about 14%
10-15 mph went from 6.7% to about 3%
15-20 mph went from 1.0% to about 0.4%  

The number of vehicles traveling 0-5 mph BELOW the speed limit increased from 17.9% to about 38%.

Overall the speeds dropped. 
The 'after' percentages were taken as an average of the 5-days following installation.

With safer streets being a high priority of any city or town council this unique technology has also brought an unprecedented amount of excellent PR to acknowledge the innovative and creative efforts of the Cities traffic engineering division.

Evidence of this can be seen by viewing the following news article links:

http://www.komotv.com/home/video/9852981.html http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/158589.html