A city plan to replace 11 traffic signals in downtown Coeur d’Alene could take an $84,000 chunk out of the city budget.

City engineer Chris Bosley got the green light Tuesday from the City Council to secure grant funding to pay for the rest of the $1.2 million project that includes replacing traffic signals on Sherman and Lakeside avenues.

The current lights are outdated, many of them 25 years old, and in need of upgrades, Bosley said.

Over the past five years, there have been 91 crashes in the combined Lakeside and Sherman corridors downtown between First and Eighth streets, Bosley said.

Bosley asked the City Council to approve a grant request to pay for 7 percent of the cost of replacing the electrical systems, signal heads, pedestrian signals and push button lights. The council unanimously approved the measure that is meant to improve safety.

“This would help us to improve our ADA accessibility downtown and help us move traffic through,” Bosley said. “We could get the signals to talk to each other and adapt to changing traffic patterns.”

Mechanisms in the older lights have failed in the past, causing them to default to a standard, timed cycle regardless of how much or how little traffic is on the streets, Bosley said.

“We’ve had issues here and there with the detection failing on them,” he said. “It goes into a timed cycle and you have to wait a minute or two before light changes.”

Dysfunctions at times of high congestion can cause wrecks.

Since 2012, most of the property damage crashes — a total of 15, as well as one crash resulting in an injury — have occurred on the Lakeside and Fourth Street intersection.

The intersection at Sherman Avenue and Fourth Street is another hotspot where 11 property damage and two injury crashes have occurred over the past five years, Bosley said.

Having flashing yellow lights in left-turn lanes would boost traffic flow, Councilman Woody McEvers said.

“They work really well where I see them,” McEvers said.

The money, if it’s awarded, wouldn’t be used until 2020 when the work — which doesn’t include changing out the traffic poles, but would include painting them — would be scheduled.

In the past five years, two serious injury crashes have occurred downtown at the corners of Sherman Avenue and Sixth Street, and at the intersection of Sherman Avenue and Second Street, according to the city.