CSL fine tuning its synched lights plan

BY MARTIN C. BARRY

A plan by the City of Côte St. Luc to eventually synchronize many of its traffic lights is getting some fine-tuning.

The era of stops and starts on Fleet Road in Côte St. Luc came to an end when the former Borough of Côte St. Luc-Hampstead-Montreal West inaugurated the first of a series of coordinated traffic lights.

The new lights were synchronized at Netherwood, Pinedale and Randall avenues and were timed with lights that controlled the flow of traffic from Fleet at Cavendish Boulevard and at Queen Mary Road.

Last year, the reconstituted City of Côte St. Luc decided to move ahead with further coordination of traffic lights, when city council authorized a preliminary study towards helping improve traffic flow on Cavendish.

The plan called for traffic lights to be synchronized along Cavendish from Mackle Road to Kildare Road, through the Fleet Road interchange to Merton Avenue. Traffic lights at Cote St. Luc Road would not be part of the system.

At city council’s latest public meeting last month, during which an expenditure for electronic traffic light controllers was approved, Councillor Steven Erdelyi said Côte St. Luc was pursuing the next phase of the program on Cavendish between Kildare and Mackle to control the heavy flow of traffic and protect pedestrians and drivers from harm. “I know personally of a situation in front of city hall where we have what’s called the ‘yellow trap,’” he said. “For cars that are driving south in the direction on Cavendish turning left into the city hall parking lot, they assume that they have a protected yellow that is about to turn red and the other side has the same, when in fact the other side has a green light.”

Weighing into the issue, Councillor Dida Berku said she didn’t understand the difficulty of synchronizing the lights in front of city hall and that she wasn’t convinced the rest of the program could be completed successfully because of the failure to deal effectively with one problem. “I think it has something to do with the timing of this particular light,” she said. “I’m told that we’re going to put priority on this section first, then we’ll see if we can synchronize the rest. I’m not convinced that we will be able to synchronize the rest. “But if we can just synchronize this short strip between Kildare and Mackle, then I would be very satisfied,” she added. “I’d like to see the priority given to that first before they try to synchronize it with Fleet and Merton and Côte St. Luc … I’ve not yet been convinced that it’s possible.”