The Story Behind ELiMiNATOR^®

A Stalled Ambulance at Rush Hour

One afternoon around rush hour, Dave was sitting on Coldwater Road at Coliseum Boulevard in Fort Wayne—one of the busiest intersections in the city. Traffic was heavy, every lane was full, and movement in any direction was painfully slow.

As he watched, an ambulance came up behind the congestion, lights and siren on, clearly trying to reach an emergency. But the way the road was built, there was no safe center lane or escape route. Every lane was packed. Cars had nowhere to go. For an uncomfortably long time, that ambulance was simply stuck in traffic, just like any other vehicle.

At that time, Fort Wayne had no traffic signal preemption in place. The intersection couldn’t “see” the ambulance, couldn’t help clear a path, and couldn’t give it a clean shot through the signal. Sitting at that light, Dave found himself thinking:

“There has to be a better way to do this.”

Finding the Limits of Existing Preemption

That moment turned into a question that wouldn’t go away. Dave began digging into the technologies that already existed to help emergency vehicles at intersections. He looked at optical preemption systems and other established approaches, studying how they worked, where they performed well, and where they fell short.

What he kept running into was the same pattern:

• Systems that worked only at relatively short ranges.
• Systems that depended heavily on clear line-of-sight between vehicle and sensor.
• Deployments that were often expensive or impractical for many agencies.
• Solutions that didn’t fully address the real-world conditions he had just witnessed: heavy congestion, no escape path, and no way for the signal to “know” the ambulance was there soon enough to meaningfully help.

Dave wasn’t interested in simply copying what was already on the market. He wanted to find a way to do better.

From an Idea to an Engineering Team

Dave’s mix of medical training, technical curiosity, and years of exposure to communications and signal systems gave him a unique perspective on the problem. He understood how much seconds matter in an emergency, and he was comfortable asking hard questions about how to do things differently.

But he also knew that turning the concept into a field-ready system would take a team of engineers.

In 1997, he reached out to the Chairmen of the Departments of Engineering and Broadcast Technologies at Indiana and Purdue Universities who, in turn, assembled a group of professors to help bring the idea to life. In 2001 Dave was granted his first patent on the technology (U.S. Pat. No. 6,326,903). Subsequently a team of electrical engineers from J&S Resource Management, ITT Aerospace, Raytheon, and Magnavox designed and built four working prototypes of the “Eliminator”^®, turning the concept into an actual system:

• Defining how vehicles and intersections should talk to each other.
• Choosing 900 MHz radio and GPS as the backbone for long-range detection and positioning.
• Designing cabinet units and in-vehicle units that could work with existing traffic controllers.
• Prototyping, testing, and iterating until they had something that worked in real traffic at real intersections.

In 2006 Collision Control Communications donated the prototypes to the City of Indianapolis for rigorous beta testing. Less than a year later, the range of the ELiMiNATOR^® radio-based preemption system was tested in the real world against the existing optical-based preemption systems that Indianapolis was using. The preemption distance was found to not be limited to “line-of-sight” (where preemption distance was only a few thousand feet) like optical systems. The use of FM radio frequencies could now also allow preemption requests to go through foliage, buildings, bridges and other similar obstructions (even around corners) to up to two miles.

What started as a frustrated moment at a red light grew into a collaborative engineering effort—one centered on Dave’s original insight and patents, and refined by the engineers who helped build out the hardware and firmware. In 2016 CCC enlisted Adam Brososky to incorporate radio and GPS into the system's platform.

Why Radio and GPS, Not Just Optics or Cellular

From the beginning, the design choices behind the ELiMiNATOR^® reflected the problems Dave wanted to solve.

See farther, sooner.
Optical systems are limited by line-of-sight and range. By using 900 MHz radio combined with GPS, ELiMiNATOR^® can detect and communicate with emergency vehicles at much longer distances, giving the intersection more time to react.

Work with the roads we actually have.
Not every corridor has room for wide shoulders, clear escape lanes, or ideal sightlines. The ELiMiNATOR^® is meant to work in real congestion, at real intersections like Coldwater & Coliseum, where geometry isn’t always on your side.

Dependable without being cloud-dependent.
Emergency preemption has to work even when wide-area networks don’t. The ELiMiNATOR^® makes decisions locally between vehicles and intersections, so preemption still happens when cellular or cloud systems are overloaded or unavailable.

Affordable and realistic to deploy.
The system was built to integrate with existing traffic infrastructure, not force agencies into a full rip-and-replace. That makes corridor-level deployments and phased rollouts more achievable for cities and towns that don’t have big-city budgets.

From First Prototype to Real-World System

Once the first versions were up and running, the team did what good engineering teams do: they kept improving them.

For those interested in the original intellectual property behind this design, see U.S. Pat. No. 6,326,903.

With real-world testing and feedback from field users, they:

• Tuned detection ranges and priority logic.
• Refined how the system behaves when multiple emergency vehicles converge on an intersection.
• Improved collision-avoidance behaviors for complex, multi-leg signals.
• Added features to support additional use cases like Transit Signal Priority (TSP).

The result of that work is the ELiMiNATOR^® system in use today—a radio and GPS-based emergency vehicle preemption and collision-avoidance platform that grew directly out of Dave’s original question at that Fort Wayne intersection:

“There has to be a way to get that ambulance through.”

Where the ELiMiNATOR^® Fits Today

Today, the ELiMiNATOR^® is more than an idea. It is a field-proven tool that:

• Helps fire, EMS, and police move more safely and efficiently through signalized intersections.
• Integrates with existing traffic controllers and infrastructure.
• Supports Transit Signal Priority for buses and public transit fleets.
• Generates clean, structured data that can feed modern safety, planning, and “smart city” initiatives.

At its core, the system still reflects the moment that started it all: a stalled ambulance, a blocked intersection, and someone who refused to accept that “nothing can be done” was the best we could do.