On the morning of June 3, Jacques Cotton was standing on the sidewalk tending to his yard. Suddenly, a car attempting a U-turn in an adjacent intersection lost control and barreled into a yield sign on the corner. The vehicle tore the sign out of the ground and continued onto Cotton’s property.
The car ran over a small peach tree and then caught itself on a larger tree, swinging 90 degrees and becoming wedged between the tree and the side of Cotton’s house. His 29-year-old son, Clinton, was sitting on the other side of the wall, watching TV in the living room.
“Anything could have happened,” Cotton said. “If it hadn’t hit the tree, it could have kept going.”
Cotton, 69, lives near Northeast Fifth Street and 102nd Avenue in Vancouver. He said people often cut through that area of the Marrion neighborhood to avoid busy Northeast 104th Avenue.
“There’s a lot of motorheads in this neighborhood,” Cotton said.
“A lot of neighborhoods have that problem, but there’s different circumstances for each. It’s a city-wide problem,” he added.
Cotton has only lived in the neighborhood for about 2½ years, but he said he’s seen plenty of traffic problems in that time.
He said he heard from a neighbor that a vehicle hit a pedestrian near Northeast Seventh Street a few weeks ago. Cotton didn’t know the details of the crash or the pedestrian’s condition.
“Some of us just assume someone is going to get killed,” he said.
Many neighborhood children play or ride their bicycles in the street, Cotton said. The nearest park and playground are several blocks away.
A lack of recreational areas for children has been a longtime concern for Charlie Stemper, president of the Marrion Neighborhood Association.
The neighborhood has three parks: Tanglewood Neighborhood Park, Marrion School Park and Tranquility Natural Area. “We don’t have a park in the southeast area near Wal-Mart,” Stemper said.
He said he took up the issue with Vancouver Parks & Recreation a few years ago, but nothing ever came of it.
“We don’t have parks within a half-mile, which is standard,” he said. “If you don’t have a playground, where do you play? You play in the streets,” Stemper said. “(The children) need a place to play. They need a place to recreate as well as anyone else, if not more.”
He said his other concern is the lack of continuous sidewalks down the east side of Northeast 104th Avenue.
“That’s the other scary part of this thing. If traffic is shooting down 104th, not going the speed limit, and you have people walking down the road, no sidewalk, how can you possibly be safe?” Stemper said.
For years, he has raised the issue, most recently in the association’s March newsletter.
“As a neighborhood, we need to work on the priority of sidewalks on both sides of (Northeast)104th (Avenue) from Mill Plain (Boulevard) to (Northeast 14th Street),” the newsletter reads. “With the increase of traffic, it will make it imperative for safety reasons that we make sure that people who need to walk to the shopping and bus areas have a safe environment in getting to their destination, especially the people who are disabled.”
Stemper said he’s hopeful that once construction to relieve congestion on Northeast 18th Street wraps up, traffic problems will be less severe in the Marrion area.
A lack of sidewalks is also a problem on other neighborhood roads, including Northeast 102nd Avenue.
Dale Netherda, 80, has lived at the T of Northeast 102nd Avenue and Tanglewood Drive for about two years and often sees people walking in the street because there isn’t a sidewalk on the west side of Northeast 102nd Avenue. This worries him because vehicles often speed down the road or fail to stop at the stop sign, he said.
“It seems like it’s getting worse all the time,” Netherda said. “I don’t know what can be done. I would just like to see something done before something really bad happens.”
There are speed bumps on some of the neighborhood’s roads, including Northeast 104th Avenue and Northeast Fifth Street. However, the speed bumps don’t stretch across the roads in one, continuous bump; they are broken up into sections.
Cotton said people in large sport utility vehicles or pickups can often straddle the speed bumps, avoiding them altogether. Additionally, there are no speed bumps on Northeast Fourth Street. He said he’s observed people traveling 50 mph down that road and come around the corner to a traffic-calming circle.
“The roundabout doesn’t do anything. People don’t stop. This makes no impression on hardly anyone,” Cotton said, gesturing to the road.
He said he thinks there should be more speed bumps, and they should stretch across the road; “speed cushions” in the neighborhood do not. He’d also like to see the city install multiple speed bumps in a row to deter drivers from speeding over them, Cotton said.
Marrion residents have expressed concerns to the city about the need to slow traffic, promote livability, reduce cut-through traffic and increase general safety, including installing continuous sidewalks along Northeast 104th Avenue, Brooke Porter, the city’s public works outreach coordinator, said in an email.
She said the traffic-calming devices near Northeast Fifth Street and Northeast 102nd Avenue have been there for quite some time. Sometimes traffic-calming devices are added as part of a development, and other times, it’s a separate city project, often proposed by citizens, she said.
Sidewalks, speed cushions and raised crosswalks were installed on Northeast 14th Street from Northeast 104th Avenue to Northeast 98th Avenue as part of a Neighborhood Traffic Safety Alliance pilot program in 2001. Speed cushions and sidewalk infill were completed on Northeast Seventh Street between Northeast 104th Avenue and Northeast 108th Avenue as part of a 2008 traffic safety program, Porter said.
She added that there are several things neighborhood residents interested in slowing traffic can do: Call the city’s traffic complaint hot line, reserve the city’s radar speed trailer, request a traffic-calming yard sign, work with the Neighborhood Traffic Safety Alliance or apply for a traffic-calming project.
The city allocates funds to install traffic control devices and signs to help slow neighborhood traffic and increase pedestrian safety, as part of its Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program.
Stemper said he believes the association applied for that program or a similar one several years ago, but hasn’t applied recently.
Although the deadline to apply for projects this year has already passed, Stemper said there’s a possibility the association will apply in the future.
