Traffic may move a little slower, but it should make it through the Main Street-Court Street corridor easier after officials updated the timing of traffic lights.

The Androscoggin Transportation Resource Center began updating the traffic light timings last week at the 13 intersections through downtown Lewiston-Auburn’s main strip.

By Thursday, most of those changes were completed. Now officials from the center – a part of the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments that studies transit and travel issues for local governments – will continue monitoring the lights to make sure traffic moves smoothly.

Most downtown drivers should be able to make it from one side of the downtown to the other, stopping at one traffic light.

“And if you have to stop at another, it should only be momentary,” said Jason Ready, an ATRC engineer.

Ready and the ATRC have been studying downtown traffic patterns since the summer, creating the new timing pattern. The light at Main and Lisbon streets is connected to engineers’ offices over a phone line, letting them adjust its timing remotely.

All of the other lights in that corridor, from Sabattus Street in Lewiston to Minot Avenue/Union Street in Auburn, take their cues from the Lisbon Street signal. Each is timed to change a certain number of seconds after the Lisbon Street signal.

“That was one of the bigger improvements to the system,” Ready said. “People were frustrated being stopped at one light, watching the light a block ahead change, knowing that they’d never make it, that they’d be stopped there, too.”

Emergency vehicles, pedestrians and the railroad will still throw those timings off, but Ready said the system is designed to get back into its rhythm within two or three cycles.

“The computer doesn’t try to work it out immediately, within one cycle, but works it out gradually, a cycle at a time,” Ready said.

The new traffic pattern will be in place from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Don Craig, director of the ATRC, said the changes also include a new early morning schedule that turns the lights to flashing yellow along Court Street at Main, Turner and Spring streets between 1 and 5 a.m.

“It begins after the bars downtown have closed and there’s not much traffic on the side streets,” he said.