Signs in South Lake Tahoe to start showing travel times

Motorists who have traveled California's highways have noticed signs with travel times posted to them, alerting them with travel times to major destinations.

Just in time for the July 4th holiday weekend, South Lake Tahoe will be getting their own set that will alert drivers the time it will take them for destinations between South Lake Tahoe and Placerville.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is implementing new technology to display these travel times after the City of South Lake Tahoe made the request. Knowledge of travel times can help visitors make better-informed decisions on their travel.

Using Bluetooth technology, readers along the highway will collect data from mobile devices and transfer that data to a server to determine how long it takes vehicles to travel from one reader to another. This information can then be used to display travel times on the highway electronic message boards from South Lake Tahoe to as far west as Placerville. Personal information will not be collected.

This project has been a collaborative effort among Caltrans District 3, Caltrans Headquarters Traffic Operations and Division of Research, Innovation and System Information (DRISI) engineers.

“This project has been well over a year in the making,” said Andrew Brandt, District 3’s deputy director for Maintenance and Traffic Operations. “We’re pleased to bring this technology to South Lake Tahoe to better assist motorists with their travel decisions.”

Caltrans staff has been testing the software in preparation for the system to go live in time for the Fourth of July holiday weekend.