ORANGE City Council will spend $25,000 extra on a set of traffic lights at Farrell Road and Telopea Way to include a CCTV camera for live monitoring to improve traffic flow before the north Orange McDonald’s opens.
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The CCTV camera was an unexpected requirement of the Roads and Maritime Service (RMS) and has set back work on the $200,000 set of traffic lights, but council spokesman Allan Reeder said the end result would be a better system.
“The camera will be monitored by the RMS traffic centre in Sydney,” he said.
“Similarly to real-time monitoring of major intersections in Sydney, the traffic centre should be able to see particular traffic problems that arise at this intersection and manually override the programmed light controls.”
Work on the new lights was expected to begin this month, but Mr Reeder said recent wet weather had also led to unavoidable delays.
“Weather permitting, city council concreting crews plan to be on-site at the intersection next week to start work on changes to the location of a traffic island,” he said.
“The new traffic lights are expected to be installed by mid-April and weather permitting, re-location of traffic islands will be completed by the end of the month.”
Changes to the traffic lights’ design, RMS approval and a number of electrical engineering issues that arose since the contract for the traffic lights was awarded in February, have also taken time to resolve, Mr Reeder said.
A construction fence and site offices were set up at the McDonald’s site this week.
A McDonald’s spokeswoman said work had begun and the restaurant was expected to open within six months.
“The traffic lights will be operating before we open,” she said.
“The restaurant will create approximately 120 local jobs.”
clare.colley@fairfaxmedia.com.au