Beverly Hurley wants the same thing.

The two North Raleigh residents come from different backgrounds but express the same exasperation with the city's routine road congestion. They sent e-mail to the Road Worrier separately to inquire about prospects for getting Raleigh's traffic signals synchronized with the ebb and flow of traffic.

Hurley came here in 2006 from a bigger metropolitan area, Kansas City, and was dismayed to discover Raleigh's traffic problems were so much worse.

"That was probably my biggest stress factor when I moved here -- I couldn't get over it," said Hurley, 52. "In that area down near Crabtree Valley Mall, for example, it seems like when one traffic light goes, the next one doesn't. So it really backs up in there."

Fahnestock, 64, has lived in the Brentwood area off Capital Boulevard since 1972, "when there weren't any traffic lights out here." He has seen Raleigh's traffic problems grow up around his once-bucolic neighborhood.

He was surprised to learn that the Mini City area on Capital Boulevard, near his home, is where city traffic engineers claim some of their best results in timing the signals at each intersection in sequence, to reduce delays.

"If the lights are synchronized," Fahnestock said, "they're set to catch you at every light!"

Hurley thinks Raleigh could learn from Kansas City's recent success in modernizing its traffic signal network.

According to the Texas Transportation Institute, rush-hour congestion in 2005 caused Raleigh-Durham area commuters to waste 35 hours stuck in traffic over the course of a year. That was two hours worse than our average delay in 2000.

But in Kansas City, traffic congestion cost commuters 17 hours of delay in 2005 -- and that was a two-hour improvement from their experience in 2000.

Improvements for Raleigh's traffic signal system are a few years away, and it's not clear how dramatic they will be.

The city is in the midst of a $28 million effort to modernize its creaky, copper-wired signal network. Mike Kennon, the city transportation operations manager, and H.P. Humphries, who runs Raleigh's signal system, say the planning is nearly finished and the first construction contracts will be awarded late this summer.

The work will be done in phases, starting in central and northeastern Raleigh. Some traffic corridors will come on line with new improvements by late 2010, with the rest by the end of 2011.

Contractors will string the city with 185 miles of fiber optic cable -- some buried, some overhead -- to link the city traffic control center with new control boxes at 585 intersections.

With video cameras to be installed at 40 new locations, traffic engineers will be able to see more accidents and other problems that create instant traffic jams. They'll have more power to change the red-light, green-light timing at nearby intersections, to break up the gridlock.

"Additional cameras will give us some eyes we don't have now, and we'll have a faster response time," Humphries said.

Kennon does not promise the end of traffic congestion as we know it.

But he says recent improvements on some roads -- including, to Fahnestock's surprise, Capital Boulevard -- have shown that smarter signals can keep everybody moving a little faster.

"When we go out there and change the timing plans and get this additional flexibility," Kennon said, "we've seen a five to 10 percent decrease in average delay."

Is that good? Is that all? I guess we'll take what we can get.