Monterey is implementing traffic technology to mitigate congestion on the city’s busiest street.

For commuters who’ve noticed smoother traffic flow on Lighthouse Avenue in Monterey in the past year, there’s a reason for that. There is also hope for a speedier future.

The city of Monterey, utilizing $384,000 in grant money from the Monterey Bay Air Resources District, and another $126,000 from the city’s Neighborhood Improvement Program, has implemented an adaptive traffic management system between Hoffman and Reeside avenues that uses cameras to read and react to traffic conditions in real time, and the traffic lights respond accordingly.

Lighthouse is among the most congested traffic arteries on the Monterey Peninsula, and serves about 55,000 cars per day – more than the 51,000 cars that travel daily on Highway 1 between Munras Avenue and North Fremont Street.

Andrea Renny, a city traffic engineer, is leading the effort to continue improving the flow, and says the next two phases of the project – installing adaptive management systems on Del Monte Avenue from Washington Street to Sloat Avenue, and then Sloat to English – will be finished by the end of this year, and the summer of next year, respectively.

Some of that work will be funded through Measure X, approved by voters in 2016.

Those improvements are key, Renny says, because traffic on Del Monte spills back onto Lighthouse. Yet even with the most reactive system, Renny emphasizes there are limits to technology’s ability to solve the congestion, which is why she and other city officials are meeting with large employers in the area – like the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula – about staggering employee start times to take pressure off the bottlenecks.