The concern that members of Butler City Council currently are expressing regarding the Main Street (Route 8) congested-traffic situation should have been expressed before the council "signed on" to what so far has amounted to a boondoggle.

Even if council members were truly convinced that reducing the former four travel lanes to two, with a turning lane in between, would solve the traffic-flow and congestion problems as they existed, they should have had misgivings about the project upon which the city eventually embarked because of the volume of slow-moving tractor-trailer traffic that passes through the downtown daily, besides the high volume of other traffic.

The real business-district traffic-flow and congestion solution has always been to reduce or eliminate Main Street parking, widen the four travel lanes, better synchronize the traffic signals and add turn arrows at intersections where the biggest congestion occurs. Instead, city officials jumped aboard the flawed two-lane configuration that most likely will become an even worse boondoggle once the new South Main Street Viaduct, currently under construction, begins feeding two lanes of northbound traffic into one Main Street lane.

Now, experiencing the current Main Street congestion mess firsthand, city officials want to meet with the state Department of Transportation to try to determine what remedies might be available. Because of the costs and man-hours of work expended in the process of bringing the two-lane change about, the question becomes whether PennDOT or the financially strapped city are willing to waste more of the taxpayers' money in order to try something else.

The prospect of such additional waste is not palatable, when what exists could have been rejected from the outset by all concerned.

The city council deserves a big measure of the blame; the council oversees conditions in the city on a daily basis and is ultimately responsible for mistakes that occur - as well as successes. The council also deserves blame for not challenging Mayor Leonard Pintell's decision to approve the change under his signature without formal action by the council.

PennDOT is to blame for, despite its wide-ranging traffic knowledge and access to information about failed and successful projects elsewhere, did not discourage city officials from agreeing to the two-lane idea.

Meanwhile, traffic-study consultants who suggested the option to the city and PennDOT apparently, considering what motorists and commercial drivers now have to live with, didn't do enough homework before presenting the idea. The idea originated with Trans Associates of Pittsburgh, which was hired by PennDOT to conduct a study of the Main Street corridor. The now-implemented configuration was designed by Wooster & Associates of Pittsburgh, the city's traffic engineer, and subsequently approved by PennDOT.

Butler city officials aren't traffic engineers. They can be excused to some degree for not anticipating the current situation.

However, they can't be excused for their refusal to come to grips with the Main Street parking situation - the downtown's ultimate traffic-congestion bogeyman - for the city's betterment. Eliminating parking on at least one of the sides of Main Street would have improved what formerly existed, and been much better than what currently exists.

The council's decision not to go against the keep-the-parking-unchanged wishes of the Downtown Butler Association set the stage for the "permanent experimentation" that has come back to bite the city and the traffic that passes through it.

With all that considered, it's difficult to sympathize with the feelings council members chose to express at a meeting Tuesday.

"Monday . . . it took me 20 minutes to get from there (Armstrong building) to Butler County Ford," said Councilman Joseph Bratkovich about his vehicle's nine-block crawl. "With winter coming and PennDOT rebuilding the Main Street Viaduct, to go from two lanes down to one, this is only going to get worse."

Actually, the boondoggle will be less noticeable when traffic is slow-moving on snow-covered roads.

Meanwhile, James Struzzi, a PennDOT spokesman, said Wednesday that the problem is one that must be solved together with the city's leadership.

"They (city) designed it; they put it in; now we have to make it work," he said.

This time all members of the council must be involved in any decisions that are necessary. And, the public should be offered the opportunity to voice its suggestions, concerns and travel frustrations before any signatures are affixed to any dotted lines.

Butler should always work to improve itself. Regarding Main Street, it chose to do otherwise.

- J.R.K.