Valley officials credit synchronized traffic lights and real-time cellphone tracking for smoother festival traffic

Coachella Valley officials say synchronized traffic signals, camera monitoring, and real-time cellphone data have significantly changed how festival traffic is managed across the valley, compared with methods used in years past.

Kristopher Gunterson, CV Sync program manager, gave the Coachella Valley Association of Governments (CVAG) executive committee an update Monday on the program’s role in managing traffic during major festivals in the valley.

CV Sync is the regional effort to synchronize traffic signals and reduce travel time across the Coachella Valley. Phase I was completed in 2024 across 139 intersections and Phase II signal coordination project is nearing completion this year, bringing improvements to approximately 400 additional intersections across the Coachella Valley.

“The benefit of having them synchronize, there’s a lot less stop and go,” Gunterson said.

To give an example of the improvement, he said a traffic engineer drove down Date Palm Drive in Palm Springs from the freeway to Highway 111.

“He did several timing runs, different times of day, different days of the week,” Gunterson explained. Before CV Sync, the average time was about 12 minutes. After CV Link, it was about seven minutes, a 35% reduction.

Adding to the improvements, Gunterson said this year’s traffic outreach in April for the Coachella Music and Arts Festival and Stagecoach Festival expanded to cover all of Avenue 48, Jefferson Street and Monroe Street, up from a smaller area monitored during the program’s first year.

He said the expanded monitoring, combined with event-specific signal timing plans developed with a traffic engineer, allowed CV Sync to move large volumes of vehicles into events more efficiently than in previous years.

“Unless you are right around the event, you pretty much didn’t see what was going on,” Gunterson said, adding that traffic operated normally outside the immediate festival area.

Gunterson said one ongoing challenge involves law enforcement officers who take manual control of traffic signals during events to clear congestion at specific intersections.

“We’re sitting there trying to manage the traffic and all of a sudden we have no control,” Gunterson said, noting that signals can be left with outdated timing after an officer releases manual control, which he said is an area CV Sync is working to improve through better communication with law enforcement.

Indio Police Chief Brian Tully told the committee that managing festival traffic is no small task.

“We bring together 14 different law enforcement agencies to facilitate this event,” Tully said. “It affects every one of your communities for three weeks, if not more.”

Tully said the department has shifted from managing traffic manually, using radio communication and officers dispatched to individual intersections, to using citywide camera systems and real-time data to track festival-goers’ movements.

“We use cell phone information real time,” Tully said. “We know based on the entertainer when the community or when their people are coming into the valley, or when they’re leaving your city…and moving towards the city of Indio into the Polo Grounds.”

Gunterson said CV Sync has installed two workstations at Indio’s public safety campus and dispatch center, and staff plan to train Indio personnel on the system ahead of the next major festival.

That festival, Head Trip, is scheduled for Oct. 10-11 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio. Tully said the department is also looking ahead to managing e-bike traffic during future events in coordination with CV Sync and CVAG.

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