Skip to main content

Road looks familiar in North Little Rock for Swarco McCain

Installation in Arkansas includes McCain ATC Cabinets and eX2 NEMA Controllers
By Adam Hill March 30, 2023 Read time: 2 mins
Happy coincidence: McCain on McCain (© Yezenghua21 | Dreamstime.com)

Swarco McCain has installed cabinets at on an appropriately-named road in North Little Rock, Arkansas.

McCain ATC Cabinets and eX2 NEMA Controllers will be put at a dozen intersections on the city's McCain Boulevard.

The deal, through Oklahoma-based distributor Pinkley Sales, follows the city's decision last year to switch from NEMA cabinets to McCain ATC Cabinets

The installation also included McCain ATC eX2 NEMA Controllers plus Omni eX intersection software and McCain Transparity software, and the city says there has been an improvement of eastbound travel times by 18% and westbound by 15%.
 
“I had a lot of issues with the previous system, so I was looking for something different,” says Jacob Mahan, chief signal technician for the City of North Little Rock.

“I wanted to get away from being called out to a cabinet because there was a faulty wire somewhere. It would take a lot of time to trace down the wire and figure out a solution. Of course, it just happened to be on McCain Boulevard – my team liked the idea of ‘McCain on McCain’ and the mayor was fired up about it, too. It’s a happy coincidence!”

North Little Rock had never previously invested in a central intersection management system.
  
The design of ATC eX2 Controllers, paired with Omni eX software, is based on the ATC controller standard published by ITE.

The company says they also "allow agencies to preserve their investment by supporting design features that allow migration to newer technology". 

They are backward compatible with NEMA TS1 or TS2, and forward compatible with ATC Cabinets, Swarco McCain adds.
 

Related Content

  • Swarco: ‘Everyone’s running after buzzwords’
    April 1, 2019
    The ITS world finds itself in a time of great change. Swarco’s Michael Schuch talks to Adam Hill about connectivity, the increasing importance of the end user – and why you shouldn’t leave your core business behind
  • The need to accelerate systems standardisation
    January 31, 2012
    While the US has achieved an appreciable level of success when it comes to implementation of standards-based systems at the urban and intersection control levels, the overall standards implementation effort is not progressing at anywhere near a level commensurate with the size of the country and its population, says Christy Peebles, business unit manager with Siemens Industry, Inc.'s Mobility Division. She attributes the situation to a number of factors: "There's a big element of 'Not Invented Here' syndro
  • Smart Cities put people, prudence and businesses before technology
    December 4, 2014
    Caroline Haynes tells ITS International that transport planners and equipment suppliers need to adopt different thinking and the smartest cities don’t call themselves smart. The term Smart Cities has been around for some time and has become something of a catch-all term applied to novel or futuristic technology deployed in an urban setting.
  • McCain lights up Detroit with low voltage ATC 352i
    June 6, 2018
    Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) is a critical step to fully-connected vehicles, communicating critical signal information to vehicles before they arrive at an intersection. It’s fundamentally about maximising safety, mobility, and environmental applications. And McCain says that’s something it knows well. “Getting the maximum for customers is part of the brand,” says Greg McKhann, McCain’s VP/COO (pictured). “But this isn’t some esoteric science exercise. As a leader in connected vehicle and SPaT-ready