If one Sammamish resident had his way, someone would just build a bridge across Lake Sammamish.
But Jeff Dernbach realizes this won’t happen, at least not any time soon.
Dernbach lives near Sahalee Way and takes the major arterial everyday to connect to State Route 202.
He, like many of the residents packed into the Redmond/Sammamish Teen Center for the Sahalee Way open house Nov. 4, thinks this intersection outside of city limits is the root problem.
To ease traffic and stick with the city’s six-year Transportation Improvement Program, the city of Sammamish is considering a $14.2 million project to widen the road between Northeast 25th Way and Northeast 37th Street in order to meet estimated traffic volumes for the year 2035.
Thousands of drivers currently use the road to commute on and off the northern portion of the Plateau during peak travel times.
City staff collected citizen input at the Nov. 4 meeting, the second Sahalee Way open house meeting, and will take those comments back to the Sammamish City Council early next year. An exact date has yet to be scheduled.
While some residents had specific solutions — like Dernbach’s bridge over Lake Sammamish — and others were there strictly to listen, it was clear most at the open house thought the city’s current plan will not fix the problem.
“I don’t really think it’s really going to solve any problems,” longtime Sammamish resident Bernie Haringer said. “It just costs a lot of money.”
Haringer calls the Route 202 intersection a “big choke point.”
Some residents suggested scrapping the whole project, in favor of addressing some smaller public safety issues at various intersections.
Some Sahalee residents, like Lola Nelson-Mills, Sammamish executive assistant to the city manager, said adding an additional lane for slow trucks and buses coming into Sammamish from Route 202 would help ease congestion.
“If we could get people off these bottlenecked roads, that would help,” Alex Pfaffe said, looking over large maps laid out on tables for residents to add their comments to problem areas. “There are other ways out but they’re all barricaded.”
Pfaffe would like to see the 42nd Street barricade in the Timberline neighborhood opened. He lives next to the barricade and said opening it would allow the neighborhood residents to connect to Route 202 without flooding the 37th Street intersection in order to connect to Sahalee Way.
Malcolm Rankin, who has lived in Sammamish for 16 years, said the city should work backwards from the intersection and then address Sahalee Way.
Current plans, he said, are “the bridge to nowhere.”
In order for the city to address that intersection, it will require working with the county, which doesn’t have the funding to fix the road, working with state and the city of Redmond, Sammamish City Council member Tom Odell, who also chairs the transportation committee for the city, said.
He added the city’s plans will likely change based on the input city staff collected from citizens.
“What we originally looked at is going to be highly modified,” he said. “I want to do this right and I want to get this done in sequence.”
The proposed project, according to event signage, would include sidewalks and bike lanes on both lanes, a 3-foot wide planter stripe to reduce wall costs and tree impacts, and a continuous center lane for left turns.
Sahalee Way would also include a 40 mile per hour speed limit, with various improvements to three cross sections, like adding a new signal at Northeast 28th Street and 223rd Avenue Northeast.
“The ultimate scope of the project has not been set,” senior project engineer Jed Ireland wrote in an email. “We have received a lot of feedback from the public,” which the new city council will examine in early 2016.
