Traffic looms for rural neighborhood near Bothell

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, July 27, 2016

BOTHELL — Like many of her long-time neighbors, Leslie Foley was delighted when Snohomish County turned her road back into a dead-end street earlier this month. The joy didn’t last long.

Foley has lived since the 1970s in a rural enclave along 43rd Avenue SE that’s become increasingly hemmed in by the fast-growing suburbs east of Mill Creek and Bothell. The pace of change went into overdrive in 2014, after the county Public Works Department opened their road to through traffic. Cars and trucks were soon zooming to and from new subdivisions to the north.

Complaints from the rural residents pushed the county to reverse course. Crews arrived July 11 to put up temporary barriers at 188th Street SE, cutting off their street from the new subdivisions.

“It has made a real difference in that it’s a lot quieter,” Foley said.

“We just finished saying, ‘aha’ after getting our road closed. Then — bam — we get this little letter from the county.”

The following day, county notices arrived in the mail describing long-term plans for transforming 43rd Avenue SE into a functional north-south arterial. That would entail connecting to Sunset Road and 180th Street to the north. To the south, it would extend past Jewell Road to reach Maltby Road, through some areas where there’s no existing public roadway.

It’s part of the county’s efforts to keep pace with a building boom in unincorporated Snohomish County’s North Creek area, the strongest market for new homes anywhere in Washington.

The county is still mapping out its strategy for 43rd Avenue. Compiling funding for the street upgrades could take up to six years or longer. A more detailed traffic study of the area is due out in August, said Doug McCormick, the county’s interim director of transportation and environmental services.

The study also will look at long-term improvements for other corridors between the Bothell-Everett Highway and Highway 9. The area is bounded to the north by Cathcart Way and to the south by Maltby Road, which is also known as State Route 524. It includes congested 35th Avenue SE and 51st Avenue SE.

“What we want this study to do is to tell us which projects should be prioritized, which would give us the most benefit,” McCormick said.

The closure on 43rd Avenue, meanwhile, remains a work in progress. There have been reports of truckers moving the temporary barricades to reach construction sites.

“We tried to work with the trucking outfits to go a different route,” McCormick said. “Some of them complied, some of them didn’t.”

Crews could start work as early as this week to install short steel posts called bollards to provide a more immobile obstacle.

The traffic problems are one of many headaches from urbanization. The issues come into stark relief along 43rd Avenue SE, where zoning switches abruptly between rural and urban at 188th Street — where the road used to dead end. Foley’s neighborhood is surrounded on three sides by denser zoning. While they’re stuck with the traffic, noise and crowded schools from all the development, rural zoning leaves them with lower property values.

Chuck Austin, who lives across the street, is working to submit paperwork this fall to petition the county to add their part of the street to the county’s urban growth area. He’ll have to wait until 2019 for the County Council to conduct a hearing. If the petition advances, he could end up paying an estimated $50,000 for studies and fees.

Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465; nhaglund@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @NWhaglund.