During Monday’s city council meeting, an item that was expected to receive a moment of the council’s attention turned out to provide an opportunity for councilmembers to put the city on notice about fixing downtown traffic.
Councilmembers Keith Olson and Cathy Watson both expressed concerns when faced with being asked to approve a request from the city to approve a consultant’s contract to assess where right of way acquisitions will be required to build a roundabout a LaBounty Drive and Main Street.
Olson started off by saying he would have nothing to do with supporting any roundabouts east of the downtown core until traffic in the downtown core was addressed. “We were going to have signalization through the downtown. so we don’t have the roundabout feeding into a hodge-podge of signal lights turning red in no order at all with backups to the freeway,” said Olson to the rest of the council and city staff.
Ferndale Public Works Director Kevin Renz said he already began discussions with Bellingham traffic services staff (they manage our traffic signal systems) and the city’s on-call traffic engineering firm. Olson pointed out he understood Renz has only had a short time to come up-to-speed on the situation, having been recently hired, but the council has been hearing of things that would be done for over 4 years.
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Councilmember Cathy Watson said she also would not approve funds to build the roundabouts until the signalization issues were addressed. She would like to see Ferndale acquire up-to-date signaling technology and take on operating and maintaining it ourselves.
Olson pointed out that the Bellingham traffic systems expert who spoke to the council recently said that we would need to replace our current signalization equipment to accomplish what is being needed. Council was led to believe there was not much to be done since the intersections are not interconnected to allow for any synchronization.
Councilmember Brent Goodrich said he was concerned about using traffic models derived by survey data since what he has seen in past traffic engineers’ models and what happened in reality were quite different. He agreed to support the consultant’s contract but would not be supporting any Main Street roundabouts further without improvements to the downtown traffic situation.
Renz said he has asked the city’s traffic engineering firm to identify the current system abilities and limitations and recommend technologies available to provide needed functionality. He expects to hear from them in 4 to 6 weeks and will bring that information to council for discussion.
The council voted 6 to 1 (Olson voting against) to approve funding the consultant’s contract.