If you sometimes drive from Bangor to Ellsworth on Route 1A, you have watched a transformation from a narrow, winding, potholed road to a wider, straighter, smoother highway – most of the way, at least. What’s more, the delays during a long construction period have been minimal. Traffic always kept moving.

There’s a story behind this. As usual, the Maine Department of Transportation scheduled the work insofar as possible at times when traffic was lightest. Planners did not resort to nighttime work, as in the widening of High Street in Ellsworth. Instead, they stuck to day work but slated completion of the Holden segment by Memorial Day, when seasonal traffic picked up, and the rest of the Route lA job by the Fourth of July, when summer traffic gets really heavy.

But something else was added on this job. Jerry Waldo, the department’s regional manager, recalls that John Dority, the department’s chief engineer in Augusta, got the idea that traffic control on this construction project could use a computer program that regulated the timing of electric traffic lights to ease the traffic flow.

In Bangor, the planners took the idea and ran with it. Project Manager Janis Piper, her assistant Dennis Lovely, and Safety Officer Dana Hanks applied the computer program to tell flaggers when to turn their signs from “stop” to “slow.” Instead of relying on a cell phone call from the other end of a one-way zone, they took orders from the computer, varying the halts from one minute to four or five minutes depending on traffic volume.

When major kinks were being straightened out or when paving was in progress, electric signs sometimes warned “Expect Delays” or suggested “Seek Alt. Routes.” Most drivers seemed willing to take their chances and found that Route lA was better than a detour even with the construction going on.

The route remains narrow and winding from about Lake Lucerne on to Ellsworth, but the rest of Route lA will have been converted by the July 4 deadline from the old “ribbon of death” into a safer, smoother, faster ride.

And wise planners used new technology to make it possible.