General Booth Blvd. gets a fast track

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) - Saturday morning begins a new era on heavily traveled General Booth Boulevard: a new video monitoring program to coordinate green lights kicks off . The traffic monitoring is similar to that used at other heavily-traveled corridors in Virginia Beach.

The goal is to get Virginia Beach drivers up and down that busy corridor quicker without stopping at red lights if they drive the posted speed limit. WAVY TV viewer Scott Hoelz asked us about the new pole structures on General Booth.

The white poles at several intersections are camera systems to video tape the roadway. The system represents the next generation of traffic data collection tools. The video is emailed to the consultant, who runs it through the software to fully automate traffic counts, like turning movements or roundabouts.

Virginia Beach Traffic Engineer George Hardin said, "This is designed to go from point A to point B in the least amount of time."

WAVY.com found that it is only slow going between point A and point B on that road. We had to stop at red lights at almost every intersection: Nimmo Parkway, London Bridge Road, Culver Lane, Dam Neck Road, Oceana Boulevard and Birdneck Road. It took 11 minutes to drive 4.6 miles, and we stopped six times.

Lisa drives the corridor all the time. "I drive this all the time," she said. "I love what they're doing."