AUBURN – Getting rid of one-way traffic along a stretch of Minot Avenue and adding a roundabout to the Western Avenue intersection could be ways to fix congested traffic there.

City officials will be visiting rotary businesses, restaurants and residents in January to talk about ways to smooth traffic snarls.

“We’re being very upfront, trying to talk to as many people as we can,” Public Services Director Eric Labelle said. “We don’t want to get too far along on some designs without a lot of public input.”

Labelle said the city hopes to put together designs for the area later this year, with work potentially scheduled in 2010.

The city’s biggest concern along the rotary is the 650 foot-long spur that runs from Washington Street North southwest to Western Avenue. According to a 2000 study of the Minot Avenue corridor, the city noted 17 accidents between 1996 and 1998 – mostly rear-end collisions caused by traffic weaving between lanes.

“There’s a lot of weaving that occurs there, with cars having to cross each other’s paths if they want to continue on,” Labelle said. “Our biggest goal will be to get traffic to flow better through that area, and to reduce the number of near-miss collisions.”

Heavy traffic along Court Street is another problem, according to the study. It found that drivers preferred using Court Street to get downtown, avoiding Minot Avenue and the rotary. It found that two-lane Court Street had 14,517 average daily car trips compared to 10,825 trips on four-lane Minot Avenue.

The study blames part of that on the rotary. Cars headed north into Auburn on Minot Avenue are diverted onto Washington Street south, then back onto Washington Street north before being allowed to continue along Minot Avenue.

One option now is to do away with the one-way stretch south from Washington Street north to Western Avenue – essentially, between Roy’s Allsteak Hamburgers and Sacred Heart Church.

“We’ve looked at various designs for that, and now we want to talk to the businesses in the area and the neighbors and see what they think,” Labelle said.

The 2000 study called for putting stop signs or a signal at Western Avenue to control traffic. Labelle said that’s still an option, but the city could also put a roundabout there, similar to the two installed along Turner Street in the Auburn Mall area.

The city used the 2000 study to qualify for $3.7 million in state transportation money for repairs. The city needs to spend $407,000 in local dollars to get that money, but no work has been scheduled.

“We have the state money allocated, but we do need to get the process moving if we want to keep it,” he said.