Vehicles traveling east on Highway 500 wait at the stoplight at the intersection of Falk Road during rush hour in February. The Columbian files
The Washington State Department of Transportation is moving forward with a plan to remove the traffic signals from Highway 500, replacing the intersections on Northeast 42nd Avenue/Falk Road and Northeast 54th Avenue/Stapleton Road with right in/right out interchanges.
WSDOT broached the topic earlier this month, but formally announced the plan on Monday, said Regional Planning Director Carley Francis.
The project’s aim is to reduce collisions at the two intersections, especially rear-endings — currently a major problem in an area where “folks anticipate a free-flow design corridor,” Francis said. The new traffic layout is expected to reduce crashes in the area by 70 percent.
“The challenge is that the crashes we see on SR 500 are strongly related to the lights that are out there,” Francis said.
Under the proposal, workers would remove the traffic lights, install a median barrier and extend striping on the merging and diverging lane to give drivers more room to exit and enter the highway.
The project has two major drawbacks: pedestrians and bicycles will no longer be able cross the roadway at the two intersections, and drivers will lose the ability to enter the highway by making a left turn. Instead, they will have to make a U-turn at either Northeast St. Johns Road or Northeast Andresen Road.
Upon learning of the proposal earlier this month, a few Columbian readers expressed concern about how the new layout might isolate neighborhoods off Highway 500 by forcing drivers to detour a couple miles out of their way.
But the current option, which Francis said will cost “under a million dollars, probably significantly under,” is the best way to address an urgent safety issue before a long-term solution can be funded.
“We’re adding some new features and changing some features, but we’re not building something completely new from scratch,” she said. “Folks say, well, what about big improvements? We don’t have funds for those.”
WSDOT put the project out for bid Monday, requesting return proposals within a couple weeks. Though it’s a late-season bid, project managers are hoping for reasonable and competitive responses. If the agency finds a good contractor and the weather cooperates, the project could break ground in October, Francis said. If either of those variables proves unreliable, work will likely be delayed until spring.
In the long term, WSDOT is looking to build a separate bicycle and pedestrian crossing on Northeast 54th. The funding time frame for that more expensive project is scheduled from 2021 to 2025.
“We have a safety issue that rose to the top of our list,” Francis said, referring to the high volume of accidents at the traffic lights.
“It’s that challenge of, do you wait, without knowing if funding is coming forward?” she asked. “Or do you have a conversation about what options are effective for addressing safety concerns?”
According to WSDOT figures, approximately 60,000 vehicles traverse Highway 500 every day. Since 2013, nearly 400 crashes have been recorded near the two intersections, and three-quarters of those crashes were rear-enders attributed to higher traffic volumes and driver inattention.
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