Simplifying Straight Line Paths

Hey all,
new to the forum and really struggling with something at the moment, Using Illustrator CS4
I've imported a map from a DWG prepared in Archicad (vector based architecture software)
This map shows roads and buildings (they are paths in illustrator) and as you would imagine the roads are curved but rather than being drawn with curves they are composed of many many straight line paths and as I'm meaning to have a model laser cut from the Illustrator file I need to join these paths into longer paths so the laser cutting doesn't take forever.
As far as I can see it's fairly simple to simplify the number of anchor points on a curved path using the Object>Path>Simplify tool but simplifying multiple straight line paths that only have the slightest deviation in angle seems harder, or at least I can't work it out.
I have attached an image, The areas highlighted in green are examples of areas where there are too many paths and just one or two paths would be fine. It would be fine to either convert the paths to curved paths or just simply reduce the number of straight line paths that compose the curves.
Hope someone can help, Thx for your time
The

Apart from the current problem, you should take a look at the free plugin "Kartografie-Funktionen" if you do this kind of stuff regularly. http://www.ika.ethz.ch/plugins/index.html
It has a tool for simplifying paths, which works slightly different than Illustrator's

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Simplifying Straight Line Paths

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