A $22,000 traffic improvement project will improve the appearance of traffic light poles along Butler’s Main Street from Wayne to Penn Street.

The city has signed a contract with Bruce & Merrilees of New Castle to replace the existing traffic light poles with new ones.

“It's all about upgrading and improving existing equipment,” said John Evans, Butler’s building code official. “The new poles will be black so they will match color of our decorative lighting.”

The project will also include new traffic signal heads, preemption devices for emergency vehicles and traffic signal controllers.

Project manager Ken Burnfield anticipates the improvements should be finished by November.

Work on the project is to take place at night.

“(It’s) safer for (workers), pedestrians and better for businesses to do it at night,” Evans said.

While the most noticeable parts of the project, which include the installation of the new street poles, won’t be done until October, workers are already moving forward on the project in less obvious ways.

“This week, we will have all the foundations in and we can start doing conduit-crossings that go across the road,” Burnfield said. “Right now, our poles are supposed to ship in the middle of June, so you probably won't see poles until after July 4.”

The project also includes improvements to the Pittsburgh Road, where Burnfield said crews are updating traffic detection and installing ADA-accessible ramps on the sidewalks.

Evans said the Main Street improvements are part of a larger PennDOT project improving Route 8 that costs a total of $2.4 million.

Traffic control on Main Street was designed about six years ago to keep cars flowing through Route 8, while also discouraging people from speeding through the straightaway on all green lights.

Evans said the street’s safe efficiency created intentionally by the city administrators won’t be affected by the project.

“The way it's set up is you'll get green lights most of the way through, but we didn't want it to be all greens. We did a traffic study, and we adjusted all the lights,” Evans said.

“It should have no impact on the flow at all because we're not changing the lights.”