Skip ahead to Sammamish 2035.

Imagine East Lake Sammamish Parkway with a two-to-one lane configuration, with two northbound lanes getting commuters onto State Route 520 and then a shift to two southbound lanes getting drivers down to Interstate Highway 90 quickly.

Imagine a shuttle service running along 228th Avenue from Issaquah-Pine Lake Road to Sahalee Way, with beefier side streets to divert and spread traffic throughout the city instead of clogging up on one main corridor.

This, along with improvements like a network of environmentally friendly paths and bikeways safely connecting and intersecting throughout the city, is what a group of Tesla STEM High School juniors envisioned for Sammamish 20 years down the road.

STEM teacher Mike Town teaches the environmental engineering and sustainable design course where students broke into groups of five, picked a city on the Eastside and developed a transportation plan looking 20 to 30 years out.

“The interesting thing is that each of those cities have uniques transportation problems,” Town said. “Sammamish is one of the tougher ones.”

Students were assigned to cities based on where they lived; the Sammamish group, Nivi Thomas, Anton Bezruchkin, Nolan Orloff, Sabreen Mohammed and Suraj Buddhavarapu, are all Sammamish residents.

“To the core, we’re a residential city,” Buddhavarapu said. “Sammamish was founded as a getaway and that’s what causes a lot of the transportation issues.”

The city is an island with tens of thousands forced to wade through traffic in an attempt to get through or off the Plateau.

On any given day of the week, roughly 16,000 cars will travel along on East Lake Sammamish Parkway, according to 2014 Sammamish traffic count data at Northeast 18th Place.

Similarly, 228th Avenue Northeast has seen as many as 24,000 vehicles throughout a day, according to the 2014 data.

“Sammamish is an island,” Buddhavarapu said. “There’s so much backlog.”

With the current land use plan, the city will begin to see level of service failures along the 228th corridor, Victor Salemann reported to the Sammamish City Council at its May 12 meeting.

There were also more than 1,000 collisions within the city of Sammamish from 2010-2014, Salemann said. Of that, 42 involved bikers and pedestrians.

“That’s a lot,” Salemann said. “That’s a lot for five years for a medium-sized city.”

Salemann, per the city’s contract with David Evans and Associates Inc., has been working on the comprehensive plan, crafting various transportation policies and options. He’s lived in the city for 30 years.

Buddhavarapu and his group reviewed the city’s current transportation plan and met with Councilmember Tom Odell to discuss the city’s unique challenges. Odell is also the chair of the transportation committee.

The group kept what they liked from the city’s transportation plan, like using the adaptive signal control technology which will synchronize 11 intersections from the Issaquah-Pine Lake Road Southeast intersection at 228th Avenue to the Northeast 12th Place and 228th Avenue intersection.

The group’s goal was to not only get people off the Plateau quickly, but to reduce the environmental impact of idling cars.

“In this course, we try to come up with solutions to climate issues,” Town said.

He said the transportation element of the course is “critical” because about 40 percent of greenhouse gases released in this area are attributed to vehicle emissions.

Streamlining stoplights and lowering the time vehicles spend idling on the street will help reduce these emissions.

For Buddhavarapu, who’s lived in Sammamish for the vast majority of his life, the project really opened his eyes to the identity of the city.

He hopes to pursue a career in mechanical engineering and would like to continue working in the transportation field.