GARDEN CITY, Idaho — On Boise State game days, it's not just police monitoring traffic around campus.
I'm your Boise State Neighborhood reporter Jessica Davis, in Garden City, where the Ada County Highway District plays a big part in keeping fans safe surrounding the stadium..
- ACHD monitors 17 to 20 cameras to manage game day traffic.
- Wil Loyd, an assistant traffic operations engineer, watches those game day cameras and adapts to the flow of traffic coming and going to the game.
- Main traffic hotspots include Broadway and University, Capital and University, and Myrtle Street.
(Below is the transcript from the broadcast story)
"Throw that in for about an hour and 15 minutes, that'll give us about 15 minutes after the game starts," says Wil Loyd.
Traffic is definitely jammed before a BSU game and the Ada County Highway District takes the time to watch 17 to 20 cameras to make sure game day traffic runs smoothly.
Wil Loyd says, "It's usually About an hour to an hour we see a lot of people start coming in and so for me I like to get the programs in a little before that. That way they can sync up and everything is running smooth, and they know what they're doing by the time everyone gets there."
Wil Loyd is an assistant traffic operations engineer for ACHD.
He says it's usually the same flow of traffic every game day, so they program traffic for one game and use the same programming for others.
Loyd says, "you can kind of guestimate how many vehicles you're going to have coming from a certain direction or what time people are going to be leaving and how many people are going to be leaving. So those kinds of things rather than programming the same thing over and over we just save what we programmed one time. So that way we can download it to the intersection, and it'll run that exact same thing that it ran last time."
Broadway and University, Capital and University and Myrtle Street are what Loyd describes as the hotspots these are the areas that will usually get a lot of traffic on game day.
While looking at one of the traffic cameras, Loyd says, "south bound left turn longer than I'd like it to be but it usually gets pretty long that's a prime ingress point into the university but let's see if I can help it out just a touch."
After the game is when they see the most traffic, because everyone is leaving at the same time.
Loyd says backups are usually always going to happen, but traffic sensors, cameras, and engineers like Loyd can control the flow to make sure everyone gets home safe and in a timely manner.
"Know that there are a lot of people doing the exact same thing you're doing and we're out here doing the best that we can to make sure you get there safely but make sure you have some patience because everybody trying to get to the same place that you are," says Loyd.
