Motorists on 8th Street in Airdrie have been seeing a new splash of colour since Tuesday.

That's when two new traffic lights became operational in the Midtown area.  The new lights might prove a bit frustrating for drivers but city Engineering Technologist Ken Velcic assures it's only for a very short time.  Velcic says, now that the traffic lights are in operation, they're going to be synchronizing a portion of 8th Street.

"We've already collected the traffic data from 1st Avenue through to Midtown.  Now we're going to synchronize those four traffic lights, 1st Avenue, Railway Avenue, Railway Gate and Midtown Gate.  Now we're just working through that program and we're going to have the contractor install those new timing plans.  We'll probably see those early in the new year."

Velcic says, unfortunately, without the synchronization plan in place, it may mean drivers in that part of the city face consecutive red lights on 8th Street.

"What's going to happen now is it's going to respond to the traffic volumes in all directions so the side street traffic volumes will trigger the light and the major volumes on 8th Street may get consecutive red lights as they're heading in one direction.  That's a temporary thing until we get this synchronization going."

Velcic says with all the road work that's been done in Airdrie recently there are other priorities for the contractor to work on.  "He's moved off 8th Street and moved down to Yankee Valley.  We've got a few traffic lights to install there and we're hoping to at least get the infrastructure in place before the end of the year."

Velcic says some drivers might wonder why they simply didn't synchronize the entire 8th Street corridor.  He explains synchronization on either end of 8th Street will help with traffic volumes on Yankee Valley Boulevard at different times of the day.

"Currently the heavy volumes (of traffic) are heading to Calgary and back.  Right now Yankee Valley is quite a congested corridor so on 8th Street you're seeing traffic volumes primarily heading towards Yankee Valley in the a.m. and vice versa in the p.m.  We've got 8th Street south of Yankee Valley synchronized in that fashion, now we're doing the same thing on the north leg of 8th Street up to 1st Avenue.  So that's drawing the volumes to Yankee Valley and back.  We collected the data back in October and November, now we just have our engineering consultant running the programs to get that efficiency going." 

Velcic says, with the 40th Avenue linkage being open now, that also changes traffic patterns on Yankee Valley Boulevard and 8th Street, but not to as great a degree during the morning and afternoon peak times. 

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