Roadside Hardware

Kansas City Scout has sprouted yellow and blue tentacles all along the south side of the metropolitan area.

The cluster of pipes protruding from the sides of roads near entrance and exit ramps of area highways are part of a 75-mile, $35 million electronic traffic management system. When completed in 2003, KC Scout will watch the main highways and help drivers avoid traffic tangles throughout Kansas City.

The network will consist of 90 miles of yellow and blue plastic-covered fiber-optic cable connecting video cameras, electronic road signs, traffic counters and computers to a traffic operations center in Lee's Summit. Along each of the four planned sections, about 300 cameras will watch traffic patterns, looking for accidents and traffic jams.

When complete, the system will have 228 computer cabinets -- metal boxes housing computer and electronic equipment -- throughout the city.

KC Scout signs in Kansas will span the entire width of the roadway, much like the signs outside the Eisenhower Tunnel in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. Missouri will go with roadside signs that are a bit smaller. Weather and traffic updates, as well as emergency information and alternative routes, will be posted on the signs.

Eventually, the network will cover all of the main highway systems in the Kansas City area. Although the cameras will be watching drivers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they will not be looking for speeders, KC Scout spokeswoman Dianna Lopez said.

"That is not the purpose of the Scout project," she said. "The cameras are there to manage traffic flow and decrease response time to accidents. We want to make that clear."

KC Scout employees will watch multiple monitors in the operations center and can reroute traffic via messages on the electronic signs.

If there is a need for police, fire or ambulance assistance, the operations center will be able to see just how much and what types of assistance are needed, said Kim Moore, a transportation engineer at Overland Park-based Black & Veatch who helped design the network.

"The main issue will be incident management," Moore said. "The system will simply be able to clear accidents faster because everyone will have more information right away. This system will be able to save lives because we will be able to help in getting the right equipment out to the scene sooner."

The seeds for the project were sown in 1991, when the Federal Highway Commission said it was willing to pay a majority of the costs for any city that chose to design such an elaborate electronic transportation system, Lopez said.

Kansas and Missouri saw the benefits of getting something done, but it took time to get the plans ironed out because two states were involved. In 1997, the partnership officially began, and KC Scout became a reality.

Today, KC Scout is its own entity run by the Kansas and Missouri departments of transportation. Three employees run the KC Scout project. Eventually, KC Scout will employ about 12 people to monitor the roads from the operations center, Lopez said.

The federal government is covering 90 percent of the building cost for the project. MoDOT will pay 58 percent of the remaining money because more highway miles are in Missouri than Kansas, which will pay 42 percent. Maintenance and upkeep will be handled by the two departments along the same financial split.

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