07:12 PM CDT on Wednesday, June 14, 2006

By Doug Miller / 11 News

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If another hurricane heads towards the Houston area, drivers will want to avoid the fiasco that happened during last summer’s evacuation of Hurricane Rita—not just in Houston, but outside the city.

KHOU-TV

Even some small Texas towns have rudimentary traffic cameras.

The state will tap into traffic cameras in small towns and post those pictures on the Internet to help drivers find the best way to safety.

Houston traffic is bad enough on a normal day.  But during the Hurricane Rita evacuation, disaster managers needed real time information on traffic jams.

“It’s critically important,” Mayor Bill White said.  “The police chief himself had to go up in a helicopter and radio back to me.”

They watched the worst traffic jam in Houston’s history on Transtar cameras.  But disaster planners later concluded this was a critical weakness.

Transtar’s cameras keep an eye on freeways in the Houston area.  But in an evacuation, the traffic jams extend well beyond Houston, beyond Harris County and beyond the range of Transtar’s network of cameras.

Even some small Texas towns have rudimentary traffic cameras like these mounted atop Houston traffic lights. 

By hooking such cameras to wireless Internet connections, the state’s transportation department is now getting still shots showing traffic conditions a long way from Houston.

Traffic snapshots from small Texas towns like Jasper and Buna are connecting cameras on evacuation routes as far away as Columbus, Hempstead, Huntsville and Beaumont.

“Depending on how much traffic we’re trying to move, if we can see that traffic is now running at good speeds in Columbus, that may help you make a decision as to whether you terminate a contra flow operation, perhaps at that time,” said Janelle Gbur, Texas Department of Transportation.

Transtar plans to soon put the regional camera images on its Web site so drivers can see a regional traffic picture—even on a normal traffic day.