Cheap fix improves the flow
Published 4:54 pm Monday, May 18, 2009
It’s amazing what a little paint can do to improve things. Including traffic jams.
Six weeks after the state Department of Transportation opened a restriped shoulder to afternoon commuters on the eastbound U.S. 2 trestle, a major bottleneck has eased remarkably. Nearly a mile and a half of lane capacity was added, and it didn’t require major new construction or hundreds of millions of dollars. Score one for practical thinking.
The work, which included narrowing the two existing lanes by one foot each, reducing the width of the left-hand shoulder and widening the right shoulder from 10 to 14 feet — along with installing new signs to explain the new traffic flow — added up to just $100,000. The DOT tapped into its “low-cost enhancement budget” to get it done.
During the peak afternoon commute — 3-7 p.m. Monday-Friday — the right-hand shoulder is now open to traffic all the way across the eastbound trestle, the newer and wider of the two parallel spans. Where three lanes used to merge into two, creating backups that on most evenings helped slow traffic to a crawl on northbound I-5, traffic flows much more freely.
This is the second major improvement in the past year to the daily commute for thousands of folks who live in Lake Stevens, Snohomish and points east. In 2008, work was completed on the widening of I-5 through Everett, which removed a major choke point at the southbound freeway entrance from the westbound trestle. Typical mornings have seen a smooth traffic flow across the span ever since.
Clearly, not every congestion problem can be solved this way. The biggest remaining bottleneck for trestle commuters, the morning merge of westbound traffic from Highway 204 and SE 20th Street, will take more than paint to fix.
But given tight budgets, opportunities to make substantial improvements for a relatively small investment should be high on the transportation priority list. In many places, rush-hour backups can be reduced significantly by making dedicated turn lanes longer, making lines of through traffic shorter. Several intersections along Highway 9 are undergoing just such improvements, or are scheduled to in the near future.
Finding the hundreds of millions it would have taken to widen the U.S. 2 trestle would have been a long and probably fruitless quest. Planners from Snohomish County, Everett and Lake Stevens realized that and were calling for restriping as far back as 2002. The state finally came through, and the results are impressive.
Transportation planners should be on the lookout for more chances to put some paint to good use.
