HomeMy WebLinkAbout120522 Re_ Written testimony for JeffCo Board of County Commissioners - Shine Road Traffic and Safety issues________________________________
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Excellent work, Steve! You have provided an effective voice representing the thoughts presented. Thank you for your time and effort. Closer to home, Hansville has installed highly effective
speed “tables”. Bumps/tables have always been our choice. They really can’t be that expensive and are they really an impediment for emergency vehicles since speeding is already unsafe?….
marcia & bruce
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 4, 2022, at 11:04 PM, Steve Dittmar <swdittmar@gmail.com> wrote:
County Commissioners,
I plan to attend the meeting on 12/5/22 via Zoom and am submitting the following written materials for your consideration.
Goal: To have budget allocated to review issues noted below and implement changes to improve the traffic and safety issues on and around Shine Road.
Background:
1. When the bridge is closed to traffic and traffic backs up past the west end of Shine Rd then Google navigation routes a bypass through/onto Shine Rd and our little single lane county
road becomes a speedway. Some cars are civil but many are racing to get around the backup. Shine is used by many in the area as a walking path but Shine has dips with corners (around
Hicks park) and narrow spaces that make it extremely dangerous with speeding traffic for walkers – near misses for many of us!
These backups are most frequent in the summer during the busy Olympic Peninsula vacation times and occasionally on an off-season SR104 heavy traffic day when the bridge opens.
2. Shine Road is heavily used by walkers and its essentially a narrow country road that in a number of places is really only a single lane road with 2-way traffic
3. We get the occasional random speeder that comes racing through… crazy dangerous for walkers.
4. My property runs along Shine Rd, my wife and I personally see the traffic and the speeding. I personally walk my dog on Shine Rd and have had a very VERY close miss with a car speeding
by.
5. In 2023 the round-about at SR104/Shine/Paradise will be under construction. From many I talk with here on Shine we are very concerned about SR104 construction backups and the resulting
bypass traffic onto Shine Rd.
Request for Budget to:
1. Initiate a project to consider the traffic and safety issues here on Shine Rd and implement some reasonable low cost changes to see if they have a positive effect.
For Example:
a) Install speed bumps (like they have in Seattle, see pictures below)
b) Request that Google remove Shine Road as a bypass option when traffic is backed up on SR104
- Can the county directly request to Google to remove Shine Road as a bypass option due to Safety concerns (narrow road with heavy pedestrian use)
- Can Shine Rd be changed to “Local Access ONLY”? Will this stop the Google traffic routing algorithms from routing traffic onto Shine Rd
- Can some part of Shine Rd be officially designated as one-way west bound so that the Google algorithms can’t route traffic east bound on Shine Rd, but still let local traffic
be allowed to use that section as 2-way. One area to do this could be between Watney Ln and Hicks Parks where Shine Road currently is narrowed to a single lane due to the slides.
2. JeffCo to work with WA state DOT to stripe a “Do Not Block” zone on East bound SR104 at the intersection of Shine/Teal/SR104 so that when East bound traffic is backed up (stopped/parked)
waiting for the bridge to reopen that cars leaving Shine Rd can safely turn left onto West bound SR104. Stopped East bound 104 traffic makes it impossible to see West bound 104 traffic
before turning left into the West bound 104 lane. See picture below.
Issues to consider:
1. Doing a “study” to collect hard data would be very useful and would seem reasonable before implementing any costly changes. However, the best time to do a study to reliably capture
the heavy traffic would be on Sundays in the summer months or busy Olympic Peninsula weekends. The round about construction will be upon us before we have time for a study next summer
and the safety issues are real, urgent and immediate.
If it would help, I would be willing to engage our Shine Rd neighbors in a survey to collect their input on the safety issues and to see if they would support some simple changes (like
speed bumps and “local access only” for Shine Rd).
2. We have tried lowering the posted speed limit on Shine Rd from 35 to 25mph but for those inclined to speed the 25 mph signs are basically ignored
3. The county posted large signage at the West end of Shine Rd stating “No Bridge Access” but this is basically ignored, especially when Google navigation is routing a bypass around
the backup on SR104.
4. Just placing signs doesn’t seem to be effective. The general consensus here among our Shine neighbors is that:
1) Getting Google to exclude Shine Rd as a bypass option may be the simplest, most effective and least costly thing we can do (we are requesting the county do this for us)
2) Installing speed bumps would physically control the vehicle speeds for cars that travel on Shine Rd (see picture below of speed bumps on a busy Seattle arterial). None of us like
speed bumps but everyone I talk with prefer speed bumps over speeding cars. Patrol officers are effective but only when they are active on Shine, speed bumps would be effective 24/7/365.
Pictures/Illustrations related to the above:
Request to stripe a “Do Not Block” zone on East bound SR104 around intersection of Shine/Teal Lake/SR104. We realize SR104 is a State Hwy and we are requesting that JeffCo work with
WA State DOT to do this stripping at this intersection.
<image003.jpg>
Picture and location of speed bumps in Seattle on W. Mountlake arterial in the Mountlake/UW area
<image005.jpg>
Steve Dittmar
206.619.6822
30 Watney Ln (corner of Shine Rd and Watney Ln)
Port Ludlow, WA 98365
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