New Traffic Management Centre to improve Winnipeg commute times

New transportation centre to help with commute Beth Macdonell goes behind the scenes of Winnipeg's new New Traffic Management Centre that is supposed to help improve commute times.

The City of Winnipeg unveiled its new Transportation Management Centre Tuesday, allowing staff to view traffic around the city from 70 cameras and to monitor 650 intersections.

The technology provides alerts on infrastructure malfunctions and traffic information in real-time.

"We want to ensure that, of course, our citizens are able to get to work or school in and efficient manner in the morning and safely in the evening," said Mayor Brian Bowman.

Operators and engineers can control traffic signal times remotely, and can sync-up a stream of green lights.

"In the past, it took us days to do that. Now we can do that within minutes and hours," said Traffic Signals Engineer Michael Cantor.

The TMC cost $3.6 million to build, and will ring up another $500,000 annually to run.

The center's ability to reduce travel times is not left to cameras and computers alone. It becomes smarter with the help of drivers.

The city hopes Winnipeg drivers will download Waze, a free navigation app. The app allows drivers to anonymously share and receive traffic information from the TMC.

"Now we can take our cameras and actually go and look really quickly to see what's going on, identify it and put that information to Waze, and provide it to city services," said Signals Asset Engineer Jonathan Foord.

At the moment, the city can't tell how much time the TMC will save commuters, but it does plan to study it and report back to Winnipeggers.

The TMC is staffed Monday to Friday from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m..

During major city-wide events, staff will brought it to ease traffic flow.