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CDOT's Examples of Innovation and Creativity
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- Three High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes in North Carolina are under construction, and the first to open will be I-77 from I-485 to the Brookshire Freeway in October 2004. The other two HOV lanes are on Independence Boulevard (US 74) in Charlotte and I-40 in the RTP. (The US74 HOV may never open to carpools. It will probably remain transit only. If it does open to for carpools, it will be in 2005).
- One of the most sophisticated reversible lane systems in the world was constructed on Tyvola Road in 1987.
- Charlotte was the first city in North Carolina to have a computer controlled traffic signal system. Installed in the mid-70's, the system was updated in 1990.
- Herman Hoose in 1949 became the first Traffic Engineer in the State of North Carolina and one of the first in the South, before the North Carolina Department of Transportation had one. Hoose was head of the Traffic Engineering Department here, which became the Charlotte Department of Transportation.
- Charlotte was one of the first cities in the nation to develop long-range Transportation Planning. The Plan in 1959 was for 1980. To develop this Transportation plan, the city hired its first Land Use Planner. Many things identified in this plan as being needed by 1980 have not yet been completed.
- One of the most successful signal preemption systems for buses was implemented in Charlotte in 1985.
- Charlotte was one of the first cities (and perhaps the first) to use fully-actuated coordinated traffic signal systems.
- Charlotte was a pioneer (1993) in the U.S. in the use of machine vision (video) technology to detect vehicles at signalized intersections.
- In 1983, Bill Finger, Transportation Planning Manager, wrote specifications that changed how traffic signal systems were designed.
- Opened $18 million Charlotte Transportation Center in December, 1995. Funded as a public-private venture between Bank of America and the City of Charlotte.
- In October 1998, CDOT's Park It! program became one of the first cities in the country to accept parking ticket payments via the Internet.
- In July 1998, CDOT implemented North Carolina's first red-light monitoring program, SafeLight.
- In 2001, CDOT's Street Maintenance Division began using a snow and ice fighting procedure called Salt Brine Prewetting. This procedure mixes water with salt to form a 23 percent salt brine solution that is used to prewet bridges and culverts up to 48 hours in advance of an anticipated ice and snowstorm. The water evaporates from the salt leaving a powder residue in the voids and on the bridge or road decking to combat the accumulation of ice or snow.
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