Video Interview Transcript: TXDOT, El Paso District - DynaSMART

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Jerry Leos
Advanced Project Development
El Paso District, TXDOT

I'll start off with the I-10 West Corridor, that's on the west side of town. On that particular project, it was roughly about seven miles worth of the corridor and on that one, we were looking at construction sequencing. Using DynaSmart, it allowed us to go ahead and give better information to the contractor for the actual sequencing of events. Not only that but it also allowed us to look at the parallel corridors on that interstate. With that, we were able to go ahead and do traffic simulation and we were able to go back and optimize traffic signals in order to make up the difference for the capacity through those corridors.

With DynaSmart, you're able to put the whole corridor together and if you have, for example, ten interchanges together, you're able to see the modeling through those ten interchanges at the same time simultaneously so you're getting the complete picture or the better results rather than looking at things individually at once.

We were able to see the different level of services so that the interchanges that, in the past, we were not looking at the information between interchanges because we were focusing just on the interchanges. So definitely we have the advantage of looking at the corridor itself, the traffic lanes between interchanges. I think definitely that was something that we were missing in the past and this time we were able to capture all that information. Not only did we capture it but we also captured it at the same time that we were running the traffic through the actual interchanges and also through the corridor.

The other advantage was that, of course, we were able to see the traffic outside the interstate main lanes. I mean, we were looking at corridors outside the interstate so definitely that gave us also an indication of how the traffic, if it was having to overflow onto the parallel corridors, how that traffic was affecting those corridors. So definitely it gives you a better overall picture of not only the interstate main lanes but you're looking at the outside beyond that.

We were able to provide better sequencing to the contractor and therefore reducing the queuing or the traffic congestion. We were able to give him actual times as far as when he could go in and set up different traffic control plans and at the same time, we were able to provide the information to our city engineers, our co-partners in this particular project, and ask him to go ahead and optimize traffic signals on the other parallel routes, therefore, reducing congestion and, at the same time, reducing the frustration of our traveling public.

DynaSmart allows us to go to the next step, mesoscopic and even macroscopic at times. So definitely I think it's something that it has an advantage over other softwares.

You end up getting a product that's very useful and, at the same time, giving us great results and saving us millions of dollars. So definitely that was a great investment for the State Agency.

I think definitely using the software would definitely save the agencies money. I'm speaking you make an investment of, let's say, thousands of dollars to purchase the software and you end up saving millions of dollars in the long run with optimizing the infrastructure. Definitely I think that's a plus that DynaSmart provides to any user.

What I could say about DynaSmart is that it provides the results at a low cost, and I think that's the key that we're looking for. When you're having to invest, let's say for example, $20,000 or even $30,000 on other similar softwares, and on DynaSmart, you don't have to make that big of an investment and at the same time, you end up getting the same results or better. I think that was an easy sell for the district.