AUBURN — A project to link the city’s traffic lights and provide better timed traffic control is on hold, waiting for parts.
Crews removed the networking equipment connecting the traffic lights along the corridor connecting Auburn’s Court Street and Lewiston’s Main Street this summer, replacing the slower copper wire system with fiber optics.
“So the lights out there are still running and they are timed, but they’re not networked,” said Don Craig, director of the Androscoggin Transportation Resource Center.
The center is guiding a project to network the traffic lights along most of the major traffic corridors in Lewiston-Auburn. That includes Main, Court and Center streets, the area around Wal-Mart, East Avenue and Main Street from Russell Street north.
When its complete, it will allow the ATRC to monitor the lights and from a distance, change light timings to make sure they work with each other.
“All the work is done, except we need two boxes that go at the end of each system and let them connect to the networks,” Craig said. He said he expects the equipment will arrive before the end of the year.
“And then they go in, whether there is snow on the ground or not,” he said. “All of the work is above ground, so it’s just a matter of making those connections.”
The cities began trying in 2006 to synchronize the lights downtown, along the Main Street-Court Street corridor. By 2008, they had connected the 13 traffic signals along that stretch and synchronized them.
That was using old equipment — copper wires and 2,400-baud modems.
“We took them out this summer, anticipating that the manufacturer would have replacements to us in time,” Craig said.
Without the network, Craig said transportation engineers have been having to visit lights individually to make sure they are timed correctly.
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