The Washington State Department of Transportation is upgrading state Highway 502 to make the busy road safer for motorists, but some residents living along the road worry their own safety is being compromised.
To make the highway safer for vehicles, WSDOT added two extra lanes, added a highway shoulder and installed a centerline barrier between the two directions of traffic on the road linking Interstate 5 with Battle Ground.
Lois Beard has lived up a private road off Highway 502 a few miles east of I-5 since the late 1980s. Until recently, her mailbox and those of her nine residents were about 10 feet up their road and away from the highway traffic — and even then, wayward vehicles crashed into them three times.
Now the mailboxes are along the highway, and she says getting her mail has become a harrowing experience as cars blow past her turned back.
“I just won’t go out there until the (traffic) light has changed,” she said.
Beard said she was sent a letter saying the mailboxes were going be rebuilt, but it didn’t say they were going to be put on the highway.
She and a few of her neighbors who live on the north side of the highway are bothered that they have to head west and make a U-turn to head east. Some have complained that while making the turn, they’ve almost been hit by people turning right after stopping for a red light. Above all, the road feels a lot busier than it used to, they say.
“It’s like rush hour; you have to wait a long time to turn,” Beard said. “It’s worse now because they’re going faster than (before).”
Bart Treece, spokesman for WSDOT, said the highway expansion was necessary given the anticipated growth of Battle Ground and the increasing traffic flowing to and from I-5. The agency added two extra lanes, a highway shoulder and a centerline barrier between the two directions of traffic.
“If you do change the highway, you have to make decisions about how you maintain or improve safety,” he said. “The rear-end collisions and the T-bone collisions that come with making a left turn on the highway were things we wanted to reduce.”
Due to the widening of the highway, some mailboxes had to be moved. While stepping out onto the asphalt might be a change for residents used to having their mail farther up their driveways, Treece said the change was a safety improvement.
He pointed out that the new highway has a 10-foot shoulder, whereas the old road didn’t have one at all; adding a shoulder has been part of the plan for the entire project.
The center barrier was installed to improve safety between the opposing lanes of traffic. Now, as a consequence, drivers may have to make a U-turn to reach their destination, but he said the benefits to safety outweigh the inconvenience.
“We’re not going to know all the names of the people whose lives are saved because of the highway being divided,” he said. “But if we hadn’t divided it we would have known the names of people that were killed.”
To minimize the potential risk of collisions during U-turns, WSDOT installed U-turn signals at Northeast 29th, 50th, 72nd and 92nd avenues to improve driver safety for passenger vehicles and truck-trailer combinations.
Construction on the more than $84 million, 7-mile project started in 2012. It is expected to be finished this summer. The bulk of the work is completed, but some paving and road striping still remain.
