Computer crash has signals out of synch

Monday, July 8, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Commuters returned to work today following the Independence Day weekend to find that Las Vegas' traffic light coordination system was still on holiday.

The system went down at 4 p.m. Sunday and remained down through this morning's rush hour.

Debby Hauth, spokeswoman for the city's Public Works Department, said no major snarls were reported early today as a result of the outage, as the traffic signals still were operational -- just a little out of whack.

"Where it is most noticeable is when you are sitting at an intersection and you see the traffic lights ahead of you appear to be staying green a long time," Hauth said. "What motorists may experience because of that is more start-stop driving.

"The maintenance contractor is coming in from Texas today to assess the situation."

The bottom line: It took many motorists longer than usual to get to work today.

Gerry de Camp, system manager, said the problem could be repaired by tonight's rush hour at the earliest.

The Las Vegas Area Traffic Control System operates 460 traffic lights throughout the valley -- 239 in the city, 190 in Clark County and 31 in North Las Vegas.

Hauth said the cause of the outage was a "computer glitch of a critical component. Its failure caused a lack of power to the supply system."

She noted that the system, in use for the last 14 years, has had a good track record of remaining operational. The last major failure occurred in April.

An $11.3 million system upgrade, funded by federal money, is under way. Although earlier estimates said the 550-light system would be in place by Sept. 1, a conservative guess now is that it will be ready by July 1997.

"We are dealing with technology that is still in development," de Camp said. "We don't want to get equipment to put on the street that is not ready yet."

The new system, de Camp said, will use the "distributed intelligence concept," which is more localized than centralized. When the upgraded system has a glitch at the central point, the lights should continue to operate in coordination on their own, he said.