A handful of improvements along the A Street Southeast Corridor between 3rd Street Southeast and the East Valley Highway Access Road would do a lot to make that stretch of asphalt much safer for everybody.

On Monday night, the Auburn City Council awarded the contract to design and improve traffic signal timing and operations, corridor coordination, traffic signal head visibility and pedestrian accessibility on the corridor to Titan Earthwork, LLC, on its low bid of $364,775.

City staff say the city received five responsive bids, and the low bid was about 20 percent above the city engineer’s estimate. City staff performed verifications to determine that Titan Earthwork met the responsible bidding criteria.

City staff said the five bids received were within relatively close range of each other, and that the bids came in higher than anticipated perhaps because of the recent increase in cost of products containing metal and the overall increase in construction costs in the present construction climate.

Construction should start this fall and wrap up by winter.