The next time you’re sitting in traffic waiting for the light to turn green, think of Econolite.
That traffic signal may have actually been built by the Anaheim-based company, which has supplied more than a third of the 350,000 traffic signals in the U.S.
“We are the largest traffic management organization in North America,” said Abbas Mohaddes, president and chief operating officer of Econolite. “We call ourselves the one-stop-shop leader in traffic management.”
It’s also heavily dependent on engineers, who make up more than 200 of the company’s 850 employees. The engineers work on various parts of the traffic control, software, design and other aspects of “intelligent transport.”
The company boasts about 175 employees in Orange County and 450 at a manufacturing site in Tecate, just across the Mexican border southeast of San Diego.
Cross-Town Traffic
Econolite is one of two nationally prominent providers of traffic systems based in Orange County.
Santa Ana-based Iteris Inc. (Nasdaq: ITI), where Mohaddes was a CEO for eight years, reported $99.1 million in revenue in fiscal 2019. Iteris also provides products in areas that Econolite doesn’t such as agriculture and road weather.
Privately held Econolite has estimated revenue of about $150 million to $200 million per year.
Founded in 1933, the company uses a half-dozen means to keep track of traffic, including radar, laser-based technology and the familiar cameras at intersections.
Its portfolio includes traffic controllers, advanced transportation management systems, vehicle and bicycle detection systems, communication solutions, traffic control cabinets, and vehicle and pedestrian signals.
Econolite said its Intelligent Transportation System solutions “ease traffic congestion, provide safer mobility, and improve the quality of life.”
Connected Stoplight
Nowadays, Econolite is building systems using artificial intelligence to make your commute faster.
That future means your car will respond automatically to commands given by computer-operated traffic signals. While the lights themselves may not look much different from when you were a kid, the insides tell a different story.
Sitting alongside many intersections are innocuous metal cabinets that contain sophisticated computers to control traffic, often costing $5,000 to $10,000 each.
Econolite is building the system to eventually link the stoplights to vehicles, technology already in place for many ambulances and fire trucks.
Eventually, these systems will tell your car what to do at a crossing. It’s going hand-in-hand with the evolution of driverless cars themselves. “The vehicle would know that this traffic signal in 11 seconds is going to go green,” Mohaddes said.
“So if you are about 200 feet away from the signal, the vehicle automatically would decelerate or accelerate depending upon what the situation is.
“A lot of this technology is in development in tests. I would say much of this within the next five to seven years is really available to the public.”
That means artificial intelligence would come into play through a communication between the traffic signal and the vehicles “without us knowing it.”
“It is all one huge development,” Mohaddes said. “There are many, many of us that are focused on different aspects of it. We focus on the controller and the detection and operation of it.”
There’s no need to worry about the car unstoppably racing off on its own.
“It would more likely be automatic until such a time that the driver would want to take control for one reason or another,” Mohaddes said. “The driver overrules for safety purposes primarily.”
The Beginning
The company started in the middle of the Great Depression when its founders created a stop sign with a built-in flashing red light that turned on and off depending on the time of day, the first “econolite.”
It moved to Orange County in 1971 and was acquired in 1978 by Mike Doyle, the current chairman and CEO, as part of a private partnership acquisition.
Doyle has become famous in traffic circles as a past chair of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, which inducted him into its hall of fame in 2013.
The company’s two-story, 85,000-square-foot headquarters is down the street from headquarters for surf retailer Pacific Sunwear of California on just under 4 acres, north of the 91 (Riverside) Freeway.
It bought the building in May 2017 for $19.8 million from Blackstone Group under an LLC named for Doyle, putting half down with the balance financed by a Midwest U.S. life insurance company. LBA Realty is property manager.
The company said that they have put several million dollars more into the building since the sale for renovations, including a traffic management center training facility, engineering collaboration areas, a cabinet/controller test environment, and more.
Short Retirement
Mohaddes, 62, arrived in New York from his native Iran in 1975 at age 18, and co-founded his own traffic firm, which was merged in 1995 with Iteris. He retired as CEO in 2015, but Doyle convinced Mohaddes to come out of retirement a year later.
Econolite is still “very much growing,” Mohaddes said. It’s added 100 people last year with 40 new employees so far this year. The company has offices locations throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Econolite is “really proud” to have its headquarters in Orange County, Mohaddes said.
“I have no intention of slowing down,’’ he said.
