Lynnwood staff detail advanced traffic system and urge funding for signals, calming and sidewalks

City traffic and street operations staff briefed the Lynnwood City Council on April 20 about signal operations, maintenance priorities and funding pressures, underscoring public-safety and liability consequences from deferred work.

Signal operations and resilience: Mike Thomas, signal operations supervisor, described the traffic network as a coordinated, safety-critical system rather than "just red, yellow, and green lights." He gave an inventory and operational summary: "We have 69 traffic signals, 41 school beacons, 10 radar feedback signs, 800 street lights, 32 lighted crosswalks, and 48 miles of fiber optic cable" and explained adaptive corridor timing that recalculates timing roughly every 15 seconds. Thomas also recounted a contractor-cut fiber outage on 60th that took about nine hours to locate and repair and showed a video of an April 5 power-pole incident in which battery backups kept a signal operating for more than…