More than 35 years ago the Opticom™ System started a revolution in traffic management and safety. Today the world is a far busier and much more crowded place—and the need for better-managed roadways is greater than ever. Now the Opticom system includes two distinct products: the Opticom™ Infrared System and the Opticom™ GPS System.

The Opticom Infrared System uses coded infrared emitters mounted on your emergency and/or transit vehicles to communicate with the intersection traffic controller to provide a temporary right-of-way for your vehicles. Proven effective at thousands of intersections throughout the world, the Opticom infrared system can dramatically improve safety at intersections while minimizing traffic disruptions, accelerating response times and improving service reliability.

Benefits for Emergency Services
Proven value in thousands of intersections and millions of priority responses.

• Improves safety by eliminating right-of-way conflicts at the intersection:
  • First-come, first-served secure authorization.
• Validates emergency vehicle status and authorizes signal preemption:
  • Secure, encoded infrared communication.
  • Identifies individual vehicles as it time-stamps and logs all activity.
• Helps produce faster, safer emergency response:
  • Improves response times by an average of 20%. ¹
  • Reduces crashes at intersections.¹

¹ Traffic Signal Preemption for Emergency Vehicles: A Cross-Cutting Study. January 2006, Federal Highway Administration, et al.

Benefits for Traffic Engineers
Comprehensive doesn’t have to mean complicated.

• Integrates easily into current cabinets:
  • Phase selector plugs directly into CA/NY 170 input files.
  • Compatible with traffic controllers with internal preemption
• Enables conflict-free use among emergency service and transit vehicles:
  • First-come, first-served authorization.
  • Priority differentiation.
• Minimizes traffic disruptions:
  • Adjustable activation range provides optimal green time and minimizes traffic disruption.
• Provides complete call history log:
  • Confirms authorization, time of priority, direction, duration and confirmation of vehicle passage for up to 1,000 events.

Benefits for Mass Transit Operations
The green-light advantage for improving schedule performance.

• Improves on-time arrival and maximizes route operations:
  • May improve bus route timing by 10%² or more without adversely affecting cross traffic.
• Integrates with existing systems:
  • Supports J1708 standard.
• Produces a normal, natural advantage:
  • Directional communication does not disrupt parallel intersections.
• Enables automated operation:
  • Interfaces with AVL for conditional priority.
• Decreases vehicle maintenance:
  • Reduced stop-and-go driving lessens brake wear and permits better vehicle utilization.
• Reduces environmental impact:
  • Improves fuel consumption of vehicles.

² Transit Signal Priority (TSP): A Planning and Implementation Handbook. May 2005, Smith, Hemily, Ivanovic for Intelligent Transportation Society