Q: What Are Poles with Solar Panels Being Used for on Hwy 1? - Central Coast News KION/KCBA

A: Our KION Question was sent in twice by two individuals, Leslie & John, both from Carmel.

Both viewers were asking, "What are the green poles with solar panels along the highways being used for?"

Caltrans released the following explanation:

This project is installing Traffic Monitoring Stations (TMS's) at 34 locations on Highway 1 from the Carmel River Bridge to the Santa Cruz County Line - approximately 30 miles long.  These will provide live traffic speeds for our PEMs webpage which will be available for public viewing. These also provide vehicle counts and classifications (lengths) data for traffic planners.

Included are 9 CCTV cameras.  Some of these will also be available for public viewing. At present we are adding the existing TMS sites in Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara to PEMs.  Caltrans expects to add these new Monterey sites to PEMs in early 2012.

NOTE: The short name is actually PeMS for Performance Measurement System.

This project is conducted by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, at Berkeley, with the cooperation of the California Department of Transportation, California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways, and Berkeley Transportation Systems. The intent of this project is to collect historical and real-time freeway data from freeways in the State of California in order to compute freeway performance measures.

So, among other items, we'll be providing PeMS real-time data from our TMS sites for then to generate a live speed map display.