TEMECULA —— Resident Dennis Cullen said when he travels down Margarita Road toward Highway 79 South, he typically hits about three-fourths of the red lights.

"Oh God, it's just horrible," he opined. "Every street in Temecula —— none are sequenced so that a major street would take precedence and smaller streets would have to wait until … traffic goes through. You have 15 cars go a fourth of a mile and stopping and a fourth of a mile and stopping and it makes no sense whatsoever."

Cullen is not the only one frustrated.

Other people who live in the city have also complained that the traffic lights on main thoroughfares like Rancho California and Margarita roads are not synchronized, leading cars to stop frequently for red lights.

"It's awful," said resident Laura Crivello, who was eating a frozen yogurt at Temecula Town Center on Monday afternoon. Not having the lights synchronized sometimes leads to drivers blocking interchanges, she said.

A misnomer

While most drivers pine for synchronization, however, they are actually yearning for something known as a "progression program," where they are able to flit from green light to green light to green light, Public Works Director Bill Hughes said.

Many of the city's traffic lights are, in fact, synchronized, but the city doesn't use that word because it's so often misconstrued, he added. Instead, the city refers to it as "coordination," which simply means optimizing the process of moving traffic through more than one signal, he explained.

The traffic signals on the main streets do not run on a progression program because so many drivers turn on and off of them from side streets, making it too constraining on the cross streets, Hughes said.

To get to the point where progression programs would be feasible, according to Hughes, would involve something that will give many drivers chills: more traffic. Only then will there be enough drivers on the main drags to warrant holding up drivers on the cross streets, he said.

If progression programs were put into place now, drivers on side streets would often have to wait, whether there's traffic on the main roads or not, he explained. This has caused irritation to those drivers when the city has tried this kind of a system in the past, Hughes said.

"As time goes on, we will likely continue to experiment with progression," Hughes said. "Right now, as it stands today, it has not been giving us positive results. Much as people sit there and say, 'I just want green lights all the way,' they have to question themselves, 'How many times are they trying to turn off (a main road) or onto it?'" Hughes said.

Costly fixes

City Councilman Ron Roberts, on the other hand, said he would like to see the lights on major streets be green most of the time, but that it's very expensive to do so.

"I've been pushing for it for years," he said. "It's kind of a dream of mine —— to finally get (a progression program). I complain today. Going to work every morning, I know exactly what signal I will make, which ones I will miss and how many seconds it will take."

Coordinating traffic signals entails wiring them to other signals, either on the same street or on cross streets, so they are all running on the same software program, Hughes said. One of the goals of coordination is to enable cars turning left, say from Jefferson to Rancho California, to be able to move freely on Rancho California and not just turn and have to stop, Hughes explained.

On of the things that can interfere with coordination is that traffic lights at the freeway interchanges are controlled by Caltrans and the city's lights are not directly connected to them, Hughes said.

"They're based on a time clock that Caltrans runs on," he said. "We try to track that and stay in sync. If the clocks on our systems and Caltrans go off by even three or four seconds, all of a sudden, the whole system breaks down."

City officials hope that Caltrans will ultimately relinquish control of the signals at all three of the interchanges in the city, he said.

Ambulances and fire trucks can also wreak havoc with the coordination on streets such as Rancho California, because they basically trump the system, he said. Pedestrians can affect the timing, too, by taking away green light time from through traffic. City traffic engineers try to distribute that loss by taking time away from the next series of green lights, not the one green light immediately following the pedestrian, Hughes said.

On Winchester, the signals are coordinated for three peak travel periods from Jefferson to the city limits and city officials will be adding some more computer programs to deal with the time periods in between peak travel times, Hughes said. Officials will also be reviewing the current peak coordination software programs to make sure they take into account new traffic patterns and improvements, he added.

Coordination on the way

The goal: to enable all the drivers who are stacked up at a red light —— including those making left turns —— to get through the intersection when the light turns green, Hughes said. This enhanced coordination is set to happen over the next two to three months, Hughes said.

The coordination of traffic signals on Highway 79 South, from Pechanga Parkway to the Interstate, will also be improved, but the need to do that is not as great as on Winchester, Hughes said.

Traffic lights are also coordinated on Rancho California Road, from Diaz Road to Moraga; on Ynez Road from Rancho California to Winchester; and parts of Jefferson Avenue, Hughes said.

As far as Margarita Road is concerned, a project in the city's capital improvement program calls for connecting the signals from Rancho California to Highway 79 South, to prepare for future coordination, Hughes said.

While city officials are doing everything in their power to make the system of traffic lights run as smoothly as possible, they are handicapped by the limited capacity of the roads, Hughes said.

The city does have cameras on Winchester Road and Rancho California so traffic employees at City Hall can keep tabs on the roads and change the signals if drivers complain that they're not functioning properly, Roberts added.

Contact staff writer Deirdre Newman at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2623, or dnewman@californian.com.