TYLER, Texas — After many complaints from residents, the City of Tyler will be conducting a study over the traffic light signals.
"I think it's pathetic," Tyler resident Andre Williams said. "I've lived in Dallas, I've lived in Chicago. So just coming down here it's like people don't know how to respond to the things that are going on the road and it just makes traffic really difficult."
On Wednesday, Tyler City Council members approved a $621,740 engineering contract with Kimley-Horn and Associates to conduct a study over the next year.
"I think it [the study] would be a perfect solution," Williams said.
Tyler owns and operates 160 lights. The study will look at upgrading the traffic signal system and the field infrastructure.
"Which would be things like signal detection or vehicle detection, emergency vehicle preemption device, vehicle monitoring devices," Kimley-Horn and Associates' Vice President and Projects Manager, Kent Kacir, said. "Which are what we call CCTV cameras, school zone flasher technologies."
The signal detection will allow the lights to act more as motion detectors. This will prevent other signals with have less traffic from turning green.
The study will take a year. However, changes will be happening soon.
"Some of the things that we can implement that we'll identify early on may be things that the city staff may choose to go ahead and begin deployment, procurement, things of that nature," Kacir said.
Kacir says that while the study is taking place, it will not create additional traffic.