Council directs $250,000 toward the most failure-prone equipment. Some controllers are 30 years old. And the case for getting this right goes well beyond convenience.
(CLAIR | Simi Valley, CA) — “I always assumed we had a system that knew when a light was out. And I was told, no, we don’t.”
That was Mayor Dee Dee Cavanaugh, speaking Monday night before the Simi Valley City Council voted 5-0 to accelerate repairs to the city’s aging traffic signal network. It was a candid admission with a large implication: the lights that keep traffic moving across Simi Valley are older than most residents realize, and when one fails, the first alert is often a phone call from a driver that sat beneath it.
The vote on March 23 followed a detailed assessment of all 121 traffic signals in the city, covering everything from controllers and cabinets to underground wiring, detection systems, and pedestrian buttons. What the report confirmed is what drivers have been experiencing for months: signals failing, flashing red, or going dark in different parts of town. The cause runs deeper than most people see from behind the wheel.
Some of the controllers running those lights are around 30 years old. Controllers are the hardware that determines how long a light stays green, red, or yellow, and when they fail, replacements are not simply swapped in. New equipment has to be custom-programmed to match existing signal timing, which adds time to every repair. “We don’t want to wait for it to fail, especially at a pedestrian intersection,” city traffic engineer Justin Link told officials.
That concern carries weight beyond the individual intersection. Traffic signals do not just control individual lights. When they are properly timed and coordinated, they create what engineers call a green wave, allowing vehicles to move through multiple intersections without stopping. Studies of synchronized systems in California and elsewhere have shown travel time improvements of 14% to 16% on average, with some adaptive systems reaching 30%. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation documented a 16% increase in average travel speed over a 16-year synchronization program. In Orange County, more than 3,500 intersections synchronized across 903 miles of road produced 13% average travel time savings. The ripple effects go further: less stop-and-go driving means lower fuel consumption, fewer rear-end collisions, and reduced emissions from vehicles idling at red lights.
None of that is possible when the underlying equipment is failing.
Some failures are harder to trace than a worn-out controller. City staff described cases where rodents or ants chew through underground wiring, damage that does not show up on any dashboard and cannot be patched quickly. When that happens, crews have to rewire entire sections of an intersection, a process that can take a full day or longer.
That reality drew questions from the council. Councilmember Elaine Litster pressed staff on response times, asking how the city can move faster when signals fail while residents absorb the impact.
Councilmember Joseph Ayala focused on something more immediate: pedestrian push buttons that are missing or simply not working at certain intersections. “That’s a big safety issue,” Ayala said. Staff confirmed the problem is real and said those specific repairs do not have to wait for later phases of the upgrade plan, a meaningful distinction given how long the full timeline runs.
The $250,000 approved Monday targets the most failure-prone controllers before they give out entirely. It is the first phase of a much larger effort. The deeper work, replacing underground wiring and the infrastructure behind less visible failures, is estimated at $14.1 million and would be spread across roughly 10 years to manage costs and minimize disruption to traffic.
Work is expected to begin after funding is released and new equipment arrives.
Monday’s vote will not repave a single road or add a single lane. But reliable, well-timed signals are one of the most cost-effective tools a city has for moving people through it. Getting that foundation right is where this starts.
