The main thing I've learned so far in my senior project is how traffic lights operate to help move traffic along. It is a traffic engineer's job to make sure the road is moving smoothly. To do this a traffic engineer has to either rely on censors in the ground or cameras on the light itself. In the road in front of the stop light, there are round censors that pick up the weight of the car as it rolls on top of it. This censor can not only tell how compacted the street is with traffic, but also how long each car has been sitting at the light. Another thing that can be at a traffic light are cameras. Traffic engineers use the cameras to see how many cars are on the street and if there is a problem, they are able to see exactly what it is. The more high tech cameras can also count how many cars have passed through the stop light. At every light, there will either be a censor or a camera. A light will never have both.
While I was interning, the civil engineer with whom I was working for allowed me to borrow this book. It was been a great source of knowledge. Being a college text book, it explores all aspects of transportation engineering and help me narrow down exactly what my senior project is going to be about.
