Acadia to install entry-point counters

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ACADIA NATIONAL PARK – Workers will spend coming weeks installing sensors to record the number of vehicles that pass by eight different park entrances.

The new population counters, installed at the “secret” or no- fee entry points in Bar Harbor used by many local residents, are not a precursor to new fee stations, Deputy Superintendent Len Bobinchock said Thursday.

Rather, the million-dollar system will provide data about park use to help administrators pin down the elusive carrying capacity for Acadia by tracking where people go, both in private vehicles and on the Island Explorer bus system.

“What’s driving this is not so much collecting fees as it is trying to get a better understanding of the volume of people in the park,” Bobinchock said.

The traffic counters are only one piece of a $2 million Intelligent Transportation System that Acadia has purchased, using competitive grant funding from the federal Department of Transportation and the Department of the Interior.

Acadia’s proposal competed against those of several other national parks, eventually beating out fellow finalists Zion National Park in Utah and Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. The park learned late in 1999 that Acadia would be home to the National Park System’s trial ITS system.

“The park and community were so intertwined that it was a perfect place to test a system like this,” Bobinchock said.

Most of 2000 was spent working with consultants to better define Acadia’s plan for the funds and to determine what specific technologies will met the park’s goals, Bobinchock said.

“When we submitted the proposal, we didn’t have a full understanding of what technologies were available,” he said.

Next week, workers from S&L Construction in Millinocket will begin installing these transportation consultants’ vision of ITS.

Eleven traffic counters will be installed in the park’s roadways to sense vehicles passing overhead, then send instant information – including the size category of the vehicle and precise time it passes by – to a computer database.

“We’re talking about minutes,” Bobinchock said.

Eight of these sensors will be installed at all junctures on Mount Desert Island’s east side where people can drive into the park: Hulls Cove Visitors Center on Route 3, West Street extension, Ledgelawn Avenue, Otter Cliff Road, Cadillac Mountain entrance, Schooner Head Road, Sieur de Monts, and Stanley Road. Three additional counters will be installed at the high-traffic Jordan Pond, Sand Beach and Bubbles parking areas.

Acadia will still continue to estimate its visitor count from an older sensor mounted near the fee station located before Sand Beach on the Park Loop Road, Bobinchock said.

But in the future, computer software may be written to crunch the new data and produce more accurate and more detailed visitation trends.

“We’re hoping to better understand traffic flow in the park,” Bobinchock said. “This is something we’ve never had a real good handle on. We’ll know, for the first time, how many cars are in the park at any given time.”

Immediately, data from the traffic counters, which will go online at the beginning of the spring 2002 season, can be used for traffic management. For instance, traffic could be diverted from an area that shows an unusually high level of congestion at any given time, he said.

The million-dollar Island Explorer phase of ITS will have more immediately visible benefit, Glenn Gordon, operations manager for Island Explorer, said Wednesday.

The earliest phase of ITS actually began last summer, just after Acadia’s grant award was announced, when voice communication between Island Explorer drivers and dispatchers was made available during the middle of the 2000 season, Gordon said.

Radios use a short-wave frequency which is able to hug the uneven terrain of Mount Desert Island, providing better reception than cellular telephone systems. A receiver atop Cadillac amplifies all signals using the Island Explorer frequency, he explained.

The system’s second component, an automatic vehicle locator, will use GPS technology to track Island Explorer buses by satellite in real time beginning during the summer 2002 season. Avail Technologies of State College, Pa., has contracted to install the systems during April and May 2002, Gordon said.

Electronic signs at the Island Explorer’s headquarters at the Village Green in Bar Harbor and the bus stops at Sand Beach and Jordan Pond will show riders the buses on a large digital map of the transportation system.

Small computer monitors in each bus will provide similar information, as well as instant messaging capability, to bus drivers. Eventually, a similar map may be posted on the Island Explorer Web site so people can watch the system operate from any computer.

“They’ll be able to see the buses moving, to know exactly when each bus is going to arrive,” Gordon said.

The ITS grant, however, covers only the cost of hard-wiring and installation. Downeast Transportation is seeking additional funding for the signs, perhaps through the Maine Department of Transportation, he said.

The GPS technology also will be used to manage an automated passenger counter, with an infrared sensor, which will record when and how many people embark or depart the buses at every stop. During the system’s first three seasons, ridership, now nearing a quarter-million, was recorded on paper by the drivers.

Finally, an automated enunciation system will use continual updates from the GPS tracking to announce passenger information, such as scheduled stops, on each bus.

The Island Explorer’s system is believed to be unique in New England.

“There are urban transportation systems around that have pieces of this, but for one system to have all of this is, at this point, unusual,” Gordon said.

Downeast Transportation hopes that the immediate information will increase efficiency, and in response, ridership, on the bus system.

“I think it can be a powerful tool for us,” Gordon said.