Some tweaking to the Twin Cities' stop lights could ease the crosstown traffic by Monday afternoon.

Officials and traffic engineers from the Androscoggin Transportation Resource Center will update the afternoon traffic light timings Monday at the 13 intersections along Court Street in Auburn and Main Street in Lewiston. The area is between Auburn's Minot Avenue and Central Maine Medical Center.

"We'll wait awhile to see how the changes work, and if they need to be fixed a little," said Don Craig, ATRC director. "Once we're confident we have the right mix, we'll start working on the morning light timings. And then we'll adjust the lights for the rest of the day."

Day-time rush hour traffic timings could be changed later this month.

It's been several years since the light timings have been adjusted, Craig said.

"But the traffic on the road has increased, so those lights are no longer timed properly," he said. Those lights are connected through a telephone connection and can be controlled from a central location.

"We've had that connection for a while, but not the training and understanding to operate it," he said. ATRC officials as well as public works officials from both cities began working with consultants last summer to study the system, downtown traffic timings, and ways to make vehicles flow easier.

That study was released last summer, and it showed the trip along Court Street in Auburn and Main Street in Lewiston taking an average of 5 minutes, 23 seconds. The study predicted that time would increase to 8 minutes by 2025 just because of the volume of traffic on the street.

Optimizing the light at the Court and Main street intersection in Auburn alone cuts that trip time almost in half. Optimizing the lights at every intersection between Minot Avenue in Auburn and Sabattus Street in Lewiston helps even more. With more vehicles on the road, the average trip would last 3 minutes, 35 seconds in 2025.

Craig said they've been using that study to design new timings for the lights since then.

"But we've had to test them and model them and get them reviewed by professionals," he said.

Once the cities are satisfied with the downtown lights, they plan to optimize the lights along Center Street north of Auburn. That will be a different project, because many of the traffic lights along that road are not connected to anything.

"We'll actually have to go to the box and change them there, and monitor what happens," he said.