Recent Article out of BC...I'm there a lot on business. Looks lie a potential for real problems.
House by house, Clark County is filling up - and car by car, its streets will follow.
As county leaders prepare for Friday's release of a final environmental impact statement on their 20-year growth plan, they're coming to grips with the cost of keeping the county's roads wide enough to handle 184,000 new residents. In some cases, they are finding that impossible.
"You get a lot of traffic with density," Commissioner Betty Sue Morris said Wednesday. "There's no other way around it."
Last week, looking for ways to close a $260 million shortfall in the county's 20-year road budget, Morris floated the notion of lowering county standards for busy roads, essentially allowing more congestion.
"The former boards, years ago, set the bar higher than what is achievable," she said Wednesday, noting that the city of Vancouver allows average speeds to fall to 10 mph on its most crowded streets.
The county's standards bottom out at 13 mph.
The county's top planner agreed that the county can't afford all the asphalt it'd take to hold down congestion to current levels.
"We can't build ourselves completely out of this," said Planning Director Marty Snell.
Mike Mabrey, a road planner in Snell's office, said the county could cut its road deficit in half by scrapping a handful of road-widening projects around the county.
The county might also stave off expected road costs in the Orchards area by letting the city annex the land before the work takes place.
Further money could be saved by passing more costs to developers or by raising construction fees in rural parts of the county.
Lowering congestion standards can save lots of money, Morris suggested last week. But it can also be a political hot potato.
"Aside from siting a mining operation in the county, there's nothing harder than lowering the level of service," she said.
In 2003, some citizens criticized the county for lowering standards on Salmon Creek Avenue, saying the change wouldn't solve the problem of "inadequate" road funding.
Among them: future Commissioner Steve Stuart - at the time, director of the smart-growth group Friends of Clark County.
Last week, sitting on the board of commissioners, Stuart said a discussion of lower congestion standards should happen during the comprehensive plan process.
He said that would give the county time to look for noncar options residents might need.
"I'd rather have the discussion at this level, up front," Stuart said.
Elisa Murray, a spokeswoman for Seattle-based sustainability group the Sightline Institute, said road improvements are often short-term fixes to congestion.
"When you widen lanes, they often do fill up much faster than traffic models predict, because people make more trips," she said.
People don't actually want bigger roads, Murray said. They want easy commutes. And those, she argued, can come from mass transit and dense urban neighborhoods.
"You're not widening roads just to widen roads - you're widening them to get (people) access to goods or services or jobs," Murray said. "There are often cheaper ways to do that."
