The BHL Facility and Detectors
The Berkeley Highway Lab, sponsored by Caltrans is a 2 mile freeway testbed on Interstate 80 in Berkeley and Emeryville. It features, among other equipment, 160 single inductive loop detectors, magneto-resistive traffic detectors, and 8 bird's eye view video cameras. Applications of BHL include microtraffic studies, simulation calibration and validation, and field-testing of detection equipment and other hardware.
During fiscal years 2005-2006 BHL was integrated with the UC Irvine's Advanced Transportation Management Systems (ATMS) Testbed into an Integrated California Testbed. Testbed facilities provide transportation researchers throughout the state of California and beyond with the necessary infrastructure to conduct investigations in a real traffic environment. The integration of the two facilities provides a more streamlined and accountable management structure. CCIT's aim in managing BHL is to operate and maintain the equipment, facilitate and promote the use of the testbed by the transportation community, and constantly improve it by modernizing the equipment, improving traffic detection capabilities, and expanding the range of available applications.
The Berkeley Highway Laboratory itself was developed over a number of years and from the joint effort of many individual projects. The loop data is collected from eight directional dual-inductive-loop-detector stations (160 individual mainline loops) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. More details about the loop detectors and the collected data are available through the Inductive Loops page. Eight surveillance cameras provide video coverage of the testbed, yielding ground-truth traffic. A detailed description is available through the Video Cameras page. And see Magneto-Resistive Nodes for information on the Sensys detectors. The eight cameras at BHL can be previewed on our Real-Time Traffic and Info page. Although only a week's worth of one-frame-per-second video is stored, additional footage and higher sampling rates can be requested by contacting us directly.
Diagram of the testbed:
A detailed PDF drawing of the Berkeley Highway Lab is also available,
as well as a Google satellite image of the BHL testbed.
Precise Location of Loops by Station:
