Human car counters still on the job, for now

The Department of Transportation loves its
stats. Whenever it’s pitching a project, the
WSDOT will tell us how many people use the
road and at what time and for how long. It
has facts and figures on just about every
aspect of the road and how it’s used.

But cameras and computer models only get you so far.

To get the most accurate count of how many people are
using the roads, the Department of Transportation still
needs people to sit and watch traffic.

I caught up with 19-year-old Whitman College student Brett
Porter on the 145th overpass on I-5. He had an old school
Palm Pilot in hand with his eyes focused on the HOV lane.

“You have to look into each car, and you actually have to
count the amount of people in them,” he said. “You have
to classify the type of car, like if it’s a public bus, a
van pool, a work truck or a motorcycle.”

As each car goes by, Porter quickly enters the data in
the special PDA software and gets ready for the next one.

His partner, Noah Sawusch, a 20-year-old University of
Washington student, is watching one general purpose lane
at a time.

“You kind of just try to position yourself at an angle
where you can see into both the front and the back seat,”
he said. “Sometimes it’s really hard to determine whether
there’s people in the back. You just have to use your
best judgement.”

The DOT has been using human traffic counters for over 20
years because even the best technology can’t see inside
car windows reliably. Cameras catch glare if placed at
the wrong angles, and the tint on some windows is too
dark.

The DOT uses the information to determine how many people
are actually using the roads, and in a lot of cases, to
track the number of people using the HOV lanes versus the
general purpose lanes. The state wants to see if HOV
lanes really work to ease congestion.

Porter, who has no aspirations to be a traffic engineer,
has a few tricks to make sure he gets an accurate count.

“It’s not always exact,” he admits. “If you see someone,
like the passenger will often be looking behind them
talking to a person in the backseat, that’s a way to tell.
I mean sometimes it can be really difficult.”

Sitting on an overpass for hours can be more than a little
mind-numbing and doing it in the rain isn’t a lot of fun
either, but Sawusch says drivers give them plenty of
things to deal with.

“A lot of people will wave,” he said, “but sometimes
people, I guess, decide to mix it up, and they flip you
off.” He also hates it when big trucks blast their horns
behind him on the overpass. It’s a little startling, he
said.

The two have even been stopped by the police several times
to make sure they were supposed to be hanging out on the
overpasses.

The state is about the shelve the human counting, at least
for a year, not because technology has finally caught up,
but there’s no more money to pay for the program.