The Lisbon Public Works Department plans to install 360-degree view traffic cameras at two busy intersections to monitor traffic more accurately.
The cameras will be installed at intersections of Routes 196 and 9 and Route 196 and Capital Avenue in Lisbon Falls.
The cost is estimated at $42,000. Funds will be used from the Downtown and Kelly Park tax programs. The town council could approve funding this week.
“The current motion cameras at the Routes 196 and 9 in front of Lisbon High School have not been working correctly for some time now,” Lisbon Police Chief and Interim Town Manager Ryan McGee said. “The cameras in place are old, and one of them is broken. It is not even sensing the traffic coming to the lights there.”
The town currently has these types of cameras installed at two intersections – one on Webster Road at Village Street and the other at the intersection of Main Street and Canal Street in Lisbon Falls.
“There were a lot of traffic issues a year ago at these two locations, and these cameras have certainly helped out,” said McGee. “It works well at the four-way intersections, and they essentially detect the motion of the vehicle accurately when vehicles show up at the intersection.”
He said that earlier these intersections had multiple cameras to monitor the traffic in each direction, and it was expensive to replace them if they broke.
“One camera instead of putting up multiple cameras saves money,” said McGee. “We call these 360-degree view cameras as bird’s eye view because that is kind of what it looks like, and it can see four intersections from one camera.”
According to the Maine Department of Transportation’s communications director Paul Merrill, the annual average daily traffic volume on the West segment of Route 196 was nearly 14,500 vehicles per day in 2017.
Similarly, the average daily traffic volume up the intersection on Lisbon Road and Ridge Road was 16,390. The piece of Route 9, Ridge Road that comes off to the North of Route 196, saw an annual average daily traffic of about 5,000 vehicles per day.
Merrill said the West segment of Route 196 is a high crash location.
The state defines high crash sites as locations that have had eight or more crashes over a three-year period compared to other similar locations in Maine, according to Merrill.
Tricia McBride, owner of Extreme Energy and Nutrition on Route 9 in Lisbon Falls, said the intersection there gets busy frequently.
“My business is located behind McDonald’s, and their drive-thru gets backed up all the time,” said McBride. “It is busy, and they have almost 30,000 cars that pass through here at any given moment, which is crazy. I am looking for other areas to relocate my business.”
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