Now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Austrian Swarco Group, California-based developer and manufacturer of advanced traffic control equipment McCain Inc has just won an order for the world’s largest ATC cabinet deployment.Â
McCain has been awarded a one-year contract, with a renewal option for four additional years, by the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) to replace existing traffic control cabinets with new, Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) cabinets.
Over the duration of the agreement, the company expects to deliver more than 1,500 cabinets, which it believes is by far the largest ATC cabinet deployment anywhere in the world to date. The McCain ATC cabinets will be phased in over the duration of the project, with the final number to be deployed based upon LADOT budget considerations.Â
McCain leads the North American intelligent transportation industry in ATC cabinet deployments. Developed by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) as part of the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) ITS standardization efforts, ATC-approved traffic cabinets house the intersection control computers and sensors that regulate traffic signal timing, in order to facilitate the efficient and safe movement of vehicles, people and goods. Cabinets meeting ATC standards increase safety and efficiency, allowing for much greater flexibility and modularity than older cabinet types. The advantages include up to 32-channel operation, doubling the previous capacity, increased safety enhancements for installers, and real-time benefits for traffic engineers. These operational improvements use ‘lamp out detection’ to send immediate notifications to the traffic management center (TMC) when signal lights fail. They also have fail-safe flashing red alerts when the intersection backup system needs to be repaired.Â
McCain’s ATC cabinets also provide future-proof technology and are delivered ready for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication deployments, and are equipped to embrace emerging connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) requirements. The company has pioneered the development of ATC cabinets and its engineers have worked closely with standards developers to assure sustained benefit for traffic departments and the communities they serve. Los Angeles is the USA’s second largest traffic market, with incredibly complex traffic management issues, so future-proofing is essential. The agreement with LADOT calls for the deployment of McCain’s model 351, 352, 356 and 357 ATC cabinets configured to fit the specific requirements of each intersection.Â
“We welcome Los Angeles traffic engineers for their leadership in embracing the new technology. They are a unique agency, writing and deploying their own software,” commented Reza Roozitalab, McCain’s vice president of hardware engineering.
“The Los Angeles DOT personnel are very progressive and incredibly knowledgeable and that made things easier for us. At the end of the day they wanted to deploy the best product and we wanted to provide it. We shared the same dream.
“Being part of the McCain ATC cabinet development team, and seeing our technology being adopted by one of the most progressive DOTs in the nation, is a monumental achievement for all of us.”Â