HomeMy WebLinkAboutCity Council Meeting - Council Workshop - Minutes - 08/21/2001 COUNCIL WORKSHOP MINUTES
• AUGUST 21, 2001
COMMITTEE MEMBERS PRESENT: President Leona Orr, Tom Brotherton, Tim Clark, Connie
Epperly
STAFF PRESENT: Mike Martin,Dena Laurent, Charlene Anderson, John Hodgson, Steve Mullen, John
Bond, John Rostad, Don Wickstrom, Stan Wade, Tim LaPorte, Cheryl Viseth
PUBLIC PRESENT: Tom Briggs, Debbie Raplee
The workshop began at 5:05 PM.
Strategic Plan Quarterly Update
Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Dena Laurent—When I was with you last to discuss the Strategic
Plan(1 believe it was about the end of June), we were reviewing both the Council's goals that came out of
your retreat, as well as how that would mesh with last year's plan, and kind of baking that down into
something to move forward with. That was what we did at that meeting and at that same meeting you
asked for, and we had committed to, giving you quarterly updates. You asked for no more than one or
two pages. You asked for the quarterly updates in an executive summary fashion as well as an executive
summary one pager on the whole plan. The two 8%x 11 sheets that are attached to the longer plan meet
those objectives. The first page is your second quarter update. This reflects progress on your goals by
staff through the end of June, so as you had read through this maybe you thought that we were so much
farther along. Well we are,but this was what we had finished at the end of June that we were going to
. bring to a July meeting, which got cancelled. I would be happy to go through and point out a couple of
highlights or maybe you have questions on specific elements.
♦ On your Vibrant Downtown which is Goal 1 you'll see where I've written out the goal statement
that Council adopted to reflect what we mean by each of these goals. The two objectives are
denoted by round bullet points, and the arrows reflect recent actions. With regard to Kent Station,
you know that we have been in a developer application process and are interviewing finalists, and
that we're doing due diligence with regard to their credentials. There has been a ton of work going
on with regard to Kent Station. We're trying to look at how we can use the Tax Increment Finance
Package with regard to Kent Station and we're also working on Capital Budget requests that relate
to downtown development as expansion of the City campuses considered.
♦ In Community, which is Goal#2, you would note that we have done a number of improvements to
the gateways, which continues on that downtown development theme. It's under the third bullet,
Enhanced Community Appearance, where we're adding lighting in downtown. We're proposing to
continue that in CIP requests for next year's budget.
♦ Goal #3, Effective Transportation System: I would just point out under the second bullet, Build
Transportation System Infrastructure, that this is an area where Don (Wickstrom)would say we've
got a whole lot going on, and just a few of the items are highlighted—2771h construction, the
Auburn portion is underway. The trans valley study is 70% complete. Meeker and Washington
. project contract has been awarded.
♦ The 41h Goal, Strong Local Economy: it seems like that has been our focus with regard to Kent
Station, but that is not the only area in which we're doing economic development work. We
Council Workshop Minutes, 8/21/O1 2
continue to participate in those efforts citywide, including work on Highway 99, with both the
widening project and looking at options for the landfill redevelopment.
• ♦ Our Goal 5, Valued Government Services: the goal we placed on all of our support services and all
of the agencies that support those big activities is absolutely critical. At the end of June, I loved
May's (Miller)report that the 2002 Draft Budget is 5% complete. We will, of course, have that to
you this fall. I think, more importantly, the Ten Year Financial Forecast, which I think you recently
received,was 50% complete. Now that the legislature has finally adjourned, Doug and I are knee
deep in working our interim legislative plan. Things like urban transit service study, and water
issues, we're working on all of those things now.
If you have any questions about these activities, don't hesitate to ask me. Even better, ask the department.
If you have a pet objective that you're watching or something you think that we've missed in this plan,
like that Mr. Brotherton and I were just discussing,please let me know because we can address those.
Councilmember Tom Brotherton— There was an article in the South County Journal a few days ago—in
Renton there were some homeowners downtown where they've decided to waive mitigation and permit
fees on owner occupied housing, multi family housing in the downtown area. That seems like something
we ought to consider for our Strategic Plan as we're certainly trying to get all the housing we can near the
Kent infrastructure downtown and I think we ought to consider what the impacts are and what it would
mean and if it's feasible here. I don't know whether they waive the school impact fees or mitigation fees
or what.
Interim Chief Administrative Officer Mike Martin—We're talking about that as part of a package of
. incentives that we might offer the future developer of Kent Station. Part of the strategy is that we didn't
want to put that on the table until we could say it was worth this amount of money and then we could
trade off with it over something else. As you know we already have the tax exemption for the residential
portions of that. We think we may need to extend that to the non owner occupied residences in the Kent
Station area but we wanted to do the more comprehensive analysis about what the loss in permitting and
the loss in mitigation was because it may be significant. We're certainly looking at that.
Councilmember Tim Clark—Since it was a high priority for us only two years ago and it's an ongoing
issue involving the emergency disaster preparedness plan because there's undoubtedly more regional
cooperation coming, I'm wondering if that couldn't be taken out of this and be kind of a separate thing
under public safety. Under safe community you could put that to give us a little more clarity. Dena
Laurent— So always maybe regularly report the progress on that particular item so it always pops up and
you can check it on the executive summary. I'd be happy to do that.
Tom Brotherton—I'm not sure if this is tied into the Strategic Plan or not or if it's a separate issue that we
should bring up and talk about—Pioneer Street—for the busses. The standard is such that basically we're
going to wind up with the curb right next to the pedestrians and being quite narrow, narrower than it is
now, and I'm concerned about the pedestrian friendly neighborhood vision we have for downtown. It
seems like it's going the wrong way. I wonder if we really have to go as wide as we are. Is the road
required for the turning radius for the busses or is it something that simply is a standard that we haven't
adjusted for with that pedestrian friendly atmosphere for downtown.
Mike Martin—I'm not sure how that fits into our—is there anyone from engineering that can address that
specifically?
Council Workshop Minutes, 8/21/O1 3
Public Works Director Don Wickstrom- I think the radius there is for the buses to make the turn. There's
a left turn pocket and the buses come out, but remember that's the main bus route that will be taken out of
. the station in the future. The road is as narrow as we can physically make it to accommodate the kind of
traffic. Tom Brotherton—Maybe there's some other mitigation features besides just sheer width like a
wrought iron railing or something like that that would be visually attractive that would help to keep the
pedestrians feeling safe from the traffic there. I looked up the plan with that and said that isn't very
friendly and maybe there's something we could do about it.
Mike Martin—We'll take a look at that and see what else we can do. Dena(Laurent)mentioned that the
first two pages were kind of a very quick update of this document that provides the detailed backup and
cleanup and I wasn't paying attention entirely,but I wanted to point out if she didn't, that this next page is
really a summary of all of your strategic goals and objectives which can be quite useful to explain to
people what the City is doing out there. It is pretty comprehensive and wanted to compliment you in front
of the public about what a nice document this was because it was very difficult—she spent a lot of time
trying to condense down that information. It is a useful document.
Tim Clark— I wanted to say the same thing and the continuance of that in terms of our financial budget
and the opening pages of that so it's very clear and consistent in terms of our actions and what we're
trying to do and I appreciate that, too.
Dena Laurent—So we're scheduled to be back with you on October 21 S`with the Third Quarter Report.
The directors are entering this information themselves in your report so we've conned them into that.
Traffic Congestion
Transportation Engineering Manager Steve Mullen - I think what I'm going to try to do is a condensed
version of what I'll call Transportation and Planning, Engineering 101 —talk about how we do
transportation planning both theoretically industrywide and specifically how Kent is doing and has done
it.
♦ Basically, look at our adopted Land-Use, and from that we predict travel demand that land use will
generate.
♦ Determine desired performance standard or level of service - assuming the existing infrastructure and
the commuter railway network and determine based on that level of service how much additional
capacity we need to add to accommodate that travel demand.
♦ Determine the cost of providing that and in many cases decide we can't really afford to have that high
a level of service standard—and that may not be Kent's issues specifically. You go back and go
through a couple interactions and finally you figure out what level of service you can afford(level of
service is another way of saying traffic congestion).
♦ After you adopt a certain level of congestion that you are willing to afford and accommodate then we
go back and project again what kind of capacity improvements we need to accommodate that and
project that over our financial horizon and that's exactly what Kent has done.
Back in 1984, the City did a Comprehensive Transportation Plan,which involved not just Kent but a lot
of surrounding jurisdictions, citizens, and business groups. It was kind of the first Comprehensive
Transportation Plan that looked outside just the city in this part of the country. That was adopted in 1984
and from that there came another effort called the Green River Valley Transportation Action Plan which
involved Kent, Tukwila, Auburn, and Renton working together and, I assume, King County, which also
inspired King County to take a look at their Comprehensive Transportation Plan and they completed their
first ever transportation plan about 1990. In 1995 the City amended the Comprehensive Transportation
Plan to comply with the Growth Management Act requirements, and that Comprehensive Transportation
Council Workshop Minutes, 8/21/01 4
Plan was then incorporated into the City Comprehensive Plan and condensed there a little bit. The result
of all of those planning efforts is a series of improvements that have been done over the past 20 years
. which Don(Wickstrom) is going to put out there. The yellow highlighted roads are major arterial
improvements that have been done over the past 20 years that represent over a third of a billion dollars of
roadway improvements that have been built because of those planning efforts being done. It's about time
again to review that Comprehensive Transportation Plan. This is not something new or different. It is
another evolution in the process that began about 20 years ago.
Some questions have come up about signal timing studies. There have been at least two that I've been
able to come up with in our files where the City hired a traffic consultant to look at traffic signal timing
and progression. The first one which I think was done by a firm called TPD—the only outcome was the
general suggestion of shorter overall cycle lengths. The trend at the time was to build a long cycle lane so
move everybody out once you got them moving and that philosophy basically is still adhered to by DOT
and King County. Most cities run a shorter cycle and they generally work a little better for cities. The
second occasion when they did the timing plan they went out and looked and the outcome was, you could
tweak it a little bit here or there,but you're basically getting as much out of the system as you can. We
are again going back in and doing a similar study again to look at"Are we still doing it?"and it's time to
look at it again.
We have an ongoing program where we ensure that we have optimum signal time and we gather data
routinely throughout the year,both turn movement counts, 24 hour volume counts, truck percentages,
pedestrian volumes, and traffic collisions, and we use that as an ongoing thing to adjust when and where
we need transportation crews. We use a couple different software programs and we'll optimize for
individual intersection operations, corridors, and systemwide operations. We think we've got a pretty
good handle on that except that it keeps changing every day as detours happen and push some places like
squeezing a balloon. When you squeeze it one place, it pushes it out somewhere else. We don't always
have the signal timings to be able to accommodate that.
A term that we'll use repeatedly, and you've heard a few times, is a level of service. What is that?
Simply put, it's a measure of how well a transportation facility is working. In general terms or more
common measures, it's delay at an intersection or a volume capacity ratio on a roadway, and we use both
those measures in combination here in Kent. Level of service is determined on a zone wide basis. We've
divided the City into 22 zones called Mobility Management Zones, and a threshold or a level of service is
determined for each one of those Mobility Management Zones. The way of measuring that is averaging
the volume of all the arterials crossing those boundaries and divided by the capacity of those arterials
crossing the boundary. That's how we've defined it and that's how we measure it.
So how do we manage that congestion? We make sure that development,when it happens, is consistent
with that and that they're not exceeding that boundary. In general, the way we've provided the capacity is
building a series of east/west corridors that we have very successfully built here in Kent and that is still
ongoing. We're not done yet. The plans that were done in 1984 and 1995 —all the projects listed there
are not completed yet. We're still working on some of those. We've developed a new transportation
model using different pieces of software, and updated that based on new and evolving land use
information that then may give us some additional few projects to consider. But I doubt we're gonna find
anything cataclysmic in terms of additional projects that are necessary. We may find we don't need as
much as we thought we needed in certain areas because development hasn't happened there as quickly.
!Again, that's part of the evolution of updating that Comprehensive Transportation Plan and how do you
manage congestion. We adopted a level of service standard that we're willing to afford and accommodate
and tolerate, if you will. And we're not exceeding it. In certain spots we are,but overall we're not.
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The question has been asked, what is the solution to eliminate congestion? I don't believe we ever can.
We cannot build sufficient capacity to eliminate congestion and have the level of service"a"or"b"—
very, very, very expensive to do—and instead we adopted a level of service standard that represented a
tolerable and affordable level of service or a level of congestion. So the solution is a combination of
various strategies of education. Commute trip reduction was a program that helped do that and there are
other education programs to encourage people to change the way they make trips or to change the way
and times that they choose to make those trips. There is no silver bullet that's going to make congestion
go away or eliminate it. Our ability to really make the traffic go where we want it to go, unlike a water
system, is pretty limited. We can influence that to a certain degree, and we can push the traffic
somewhere if, and only if, there's the available capacity to absorb it, and we have very few underutilized
transportation facilities outside the neighborhood streets to absorb that fast. If we're pushed too hard
we're going to be pushing that traffic onto residential neighborhood streets where we don't want it. So
we do not have a lot of excess capacity on the arterial systems to be able to absorb that additional traffic.
At this point we intend to proceed with updating that Comprehensive Transportation Plan—taking a look
again at the land use and some of the changes that have taken place over the past years and seeing what
type of program improvements we need to accommodate that future demand.
Tom Brotherton—One of the concerns is that often we take mitigation funds for our development and put
that into a fund to help work on a corridor rather than improving the traffic in that given neighborhood.
One of the things that you see is that our new corridors are not yet making a difference in traffic. They
seem underutilized and people get off the corridor onto existing roads—Kent-Kangley, Smith, James, or
whatever and find that they are still stuck in a lot of traffic. We can rush down the corridor and then we
stop. What about having the developers put their money into improving the roadways to mitigate the
impact directly and not let them forever put it into a corridor project, and then the corridor projects would
have to be paid for out of our General Funds? What do you think about that as a strategy issue?
Steve Mullen—Could be done. Part of why those corridors were determined to be basically the solution
to the capacity is the model was looked at and the adopted land use, and those lists of projects,primarily
corridors, were sufficient to handle that additional demand based on the adopted land use. So if those
corridors were built, we had the systemwide capacity for those individual corridors for the development
that would take place so long as it was consistent with the adopted land use. They do also have to look at
additional mitigation beyond just the corridor. They have to pay for the corridor improvement,but they
may also have to do additional mitigation nearer their impact if it's called for, and they also have to build
the streets adjacent to their development. All that's on top of the system improvement of the corridor.
Connie Epperly—Tom, I think a lot of the inner utilization, like the 277`h corridor is perfect for me to zip
up the hill,but I'm in such a habit of getting on Kent-Kangley that usually I'm half way up Kent-Kangley
and I think why didn't I take the corridor up the hill. It's just being able to break the habit.
Tom Brotherton—I understand, but the problem I'm having mentally is that concurrency is not working
real well. We still have too many roads that are at too high a level of service and some nice corridors that
you know are there but they're not helping the immediate problem.
Don Wickstrom—One thing we've got to remember when we preached these corridor projects is that we
will have, when they're built, a lot of capacity but we will grow into that capacity, and their intent in
planning was that, over time, congestion will be just as bad as it is today once we end their full build up.
We build the capacity not to address existing problems but also future roads. The corridors are
underutilized at this point in time but they are there to handle additional roads also. As those other
existing roads become more burdened, people will peal off to take the other route.
Council Workshop Minutes, 8/21/01 6
Tom Brotherton—My concern isn't so much with the corridors. They work well and I'm sure they'll help
us in the future, but my concern is going through the intersections at Kent-Kangley and Benson, for
instance, if that was twice as big it would work a lot better. It might cost as much as a corridor for all I
know,but we have bottlenecks at intersections. We don't have bottlenecks so much on straight roadways
and I'm certainly interested in seeing an improvement in that situation as soon as possible.
Don Wickstrom—You mentioned about the mitigation payments and converting the corridor mitigation
but what you're really talking about is the system development charge. Kind of like the county when they
had the MPS charge where they identified a whole list of improvements and they charged you about the
same price as our corridor participation and they can use that money in any one of those projects, whether
you pay it here in Kent or not, the money goes up in Issaquah for a road or something. That's your
system development charge. We don't have that. We would love a blanket system development charge.
It would be a lot easier, but right now we're just continuing with addressing the corridor projects.
Tom Brotherton—It might be a better system solution to have something like that system development
charge because if someone happens to build a new development and the roads near there are in great shap,
but we desperately need the money somewhere else,we can then apply that wherever needed in the
system to bring the whole thing up to snuff.
Don Wickstrom—That may be something we want to look at when we do bring this transportation plan
back to you. Then you will know what our list of improvements needs to be and what the levels of
service will be. You can weigh those as a financing mechanism to implement the update.
Mike Martin—I don't think there's any getting around the fact that transportation for at least 3 years has
• been the issue identified most often by residents as irritating, and I think Steve is absolutely correct in
saying there is no silver bullet for that problem. That capacity issue—we got lots of issues out there— I
think if you look around the room at the professionals we have on this, you can see we've got good minds
on this problem. I think the area we fall down sometimes I think could relieve some of our fiustration that
I know our residents have is hearing better what it is they may think the problem is. For example, I was
talking to a council member about the notion of dedicating a right turn in an intersection just as an
experiment because he had noticed that cars were queuing up there and maybe didn't have to. I'm
thinking that if we start looking more closely at some of those things that may not be as obvious to us as
big planners of big corridor projects, looking at some of those things that we might do. I think that if
residents knew that there was an acute interest in this problem as they are,that some of that level of
frustration and tension might drop even, if we weren't able to cure the problem.
We're not alone in this. Virtually every jurisdiction around us is probably in a worse situation than we
are, in large part because we've had this aggressive road project philosophy for so many years. Internally
we're discussing how we might clear that stuff better. Particularly when discussing things like how is it
that we get word out to our residents that a particular road is going to be closed on a particular day even if
it's a short period of time. We've had Willis and Washington closed for about an 8 hour period about a
week or so ago on a Friday night. It wasn't a bad closure but it was a closure that was restricted. When
we looked at that particular issue we thought maybe we could have done a little bit better in informing
residents of when to use that intersection without that particular issue. So, we're beginning to look at
some of the smaller things to see if we can make a dent in the problem that way. I just wanted to assure
you, though,that virtually everybody here who's involved in traffic is thinking about this and trying to
figure out how we can do better.
Tom Brotherton—I think you're right that people can't see action going on because a lot of them aren't
subtle in terms of measurements and analyzing at your desk—not actually going out and changing things.
Council Workshop Minutes, 8/21/O1 7
I wonder if you'd get more visibility by maybe putting a section on the web page for people to offer
suggestions, like adding a turn lane or restricting a turn lane or things like that that they can suggest, and
maybe it's something we haven't particularly thought of, but we could at least take their inputs.
Mike Martin—Steve mentioned a program where our interns actually approach people and write down
their suggestions.
Steve Mullen—It was a study many,many moons ago that was done that is available. People can go to the
web page and offer comment or criticism. There's a traffic hotline where they can call their concern in.
We call them requests and we log them,keep track of them, and try to get an answer back.
Tom Brotherton—Maybe just publicized enough.
Steve Mullen—Sometimes it's very difficult to get information out to people and try to solicit that input
and get feedback. We're going to try to do abetter job of that because trying to get the information out is
very, very difficult. The education of traffic in general—after somebody gets their driver's license, that's
probably the last time they look at their driver's manual. Those rules and laws change and people don't
update themselves on it, and how do you get them excited about it? It's not going to be on the front page
of the newspaper because it's just not a headline grabber, and people just don't really have an enthusiasm
to learn that, so we've got to do something to get that out there and reach out to the community a little
better than we have and we're trying to find ways to do that.
Leona Orr—Have you thought about the Kent Reporter on the City's web page giving the information on
that page that you have a traffic concern or an intersection that's particularly a problem in your
. neighborhood or something—"Here's who you call", "Here's the web site", "Here's the whatever"? You
may have done that because I don't always read it word for word but that's one good way to get to people.
Mike Martin—We haven't done that. We were talking about looking at all the publications that are
available to us and anchoring a small advertisement that appears weekly, daily, or whatever it is with
critical closures with a number to call, a web site to check out just to give people a place to look at every
single, whatever day it happens to be, that might outline the more difficult restrictions or closures.
Internally,just a week or so ago, we started experimenting with the inspectors who actually inspect the
roads or the ones who are generally most informed about an unscheduled road closure or restriction
because contractors go out there and just cut that road. They've got generally a period of time when they
can do a certain amount of work, and they think they know it's going to be between Monday and
Thursday, but then it's on Thursday night at 5 o'clock. The inspectors are generally the last ones to know
that so we've created a mechanism where they can call back into the department, get somebody to go
right into the computer, type that up so when somebody calls City Hall, we can say, yes, it's going to be
closed for 4 hours. They're doing this type of work and it will be open and things will be fine. It's a war
of inches. But we are looking at exactly those things, by how we can communicate a little bit better to
solve that piece of the problem.
Steve Mullen—I heard a couple comments about developing something—a traffic mitigation for your
traffic impacting. Certainly, I think that's something we're going to take a pretty hard look at with the
Comp Plan Update. I think that the way Kent has done things in the past has been very, very beneficial to
the City of Kent. Sometimes they built the capacity before the demand is actually there. A few cities have
had that luxury. But we're running out of corridors. Once those are done, now how do we get that
mitigation money? So having the impact fees is something we're certainly going to explore. I certainly
think concentrating that money and getting it done on big projects still addresses traffic very, very well.
In fact the regional challenge right now is finding how to concentrate enough money to take care of the
Council Workshop Minutes, 8/21/01 8
big problems because they are very expensive to do and yet everybody gets their slice of the pie. If you
slice that pie too thin you really don't have any impact. So having the impact fee system is something
that would be a nice follow-on once the corridors are done. We can lay the ground rules for that. We're
going to look very hard where that might go. It's kind of funny that every city that has done it, they end it
at about $1,500 per trip, or right at that ballpark, which is about what our corridor fees are. So I don't
think the fees are going to change appreciatively. They would just allow us to spend them in other areas
after we get those corridors done and certainly something we will be taking a look at.
Tim Clark—I was at the South County Area Transit Board meeting this morning and two things had
showed up. The ongoing Trans Valley Area Study is actually a look at congestion, freight mobility, and
all issues of transportation in an area bounded by SeaTac, Tukwila, Kent, and Renton. They are still in
the early stages but the fact is they really are trying to come up with a plan that everybody agrees to so we
can shove it up onto the high priority list for the Transportation Improvement Board. The other thing I
found of interest there is a proposal letter from the South County Area Transit Board written by Council
member Guy Spenser from Normandy Park,who is our Suburban Cities Mass Transit expert, and Guy has
offered a plan that approaches funding from Metro based on a realization that Seattle has the lion's share
of both the service and the fare box income and that if we were simply to say, we want parity from here
on in, we would be stealing from them and that would actually give them some problems in terms of
holding on to what they have.
His proposal was to stretch it out between a two to seven year period where there would be a transition
that would allow for a greater investment of the money, over time, to create both the ridership and the
expansion of the system in the suburban areas to begin to look at serious parity. There is a tremendous
political fight on that, as you can probably imagine, the City of Seattle holding on finger and nail and the
county exec basically not being very clear in terms of what a viable alternative is other than say I don't
want that. So there has been some problems on that but this is going to come up for a vote before the
King County Council and will become the policy. It has huge ramifications for us here in Kent. They are
going to bring it up for heavy discussion in September and then it becomes a question of what the county
budget actually gets adopted, and with their$36 million shortfall, I'm not overly optimistic that
something might come out of it.
Connie Epperly— Steve,when we do this signal synchronizations, do we work with our neighboring cities
as a regional program, or are they still doing it city by city? Master builders and the Affordable Housing
Council was real interested in doing it as a regional study so you could flow from one city to another.
Steve Mullen—Actually in the back of the room we have the guy that developed most of the timing plans
for the inner cities around us under the Green River Valley Action Plan. We do coordinate between cities.
A lot of times there is a software compatibility, so it's not as straight forward as it sounds,but we are
exchanging information with the City of Des Moines and working at signal timing, and we are actually
trying to get compatible signal equipment with some of those jurisdictions so that we can do exactly that.
We were talking this morning bout Pacific Highway, which is one of our study projects we're doing with
the King County Metro Project. We are heavily impacted by what comes out of Federal Way or out of
Des Moines and a lot of times we don't know what that will do to traffic. They know if there was a way
to transfer that across, then we could develop additional timing plans for our portion of Pac Highway,but
we are working on that with those two cities. City of Auburn—we work pretty closely with their signals.
We're not really tight enough yet to where the signal timing plans would affect us too much. We'll
continue to keep an eye on that, and where there's opportunity, we do work together with the other
jurisdictions and the DOT. We actually set the signal timing plans in some of the state signals and they
are okay with that. We are cooperative with those areas because travel isn't unique, self-contained within
a jurisdiction. It does cross jurisdictional boundaries and that's what we need to be able to do. The City
Council Workshop Minutes, 8/21/01 9
of Tukwila is a huge city in terms of employment. In terms of population they are not so big, so their
traffic engineering staff is extremely limited and we work with them and offer suggestions and help.
Connie Epperly—They have all the main arterials that kind of go in there and if it doesn't work in that
one-mile area it doesn't work anywhere.
Tim Clark—Except, Connie, that is the classic example of capacity.
Steve Mullen—Renton, Tukwila, and Kent are working together more closely now probably because of
the 180`h corridor project but those cities have worked together for a long, long, long time on looking at
signal timing, cycle lengths, and how we generally handle traffic, and there's a pretty consistent
philosophy of how to deal with that. Sometimes some cities don't have the ability to adjust or stay on top
of things as quickly as some others. No credit to me, but you've got a guy back here that is mighty darn
good at it and is recognized throughout this part of the state as being one of the best yet. It's our John
Rostad who does a great job of signal progression and other cities have used his plans. That came up in a
couple of regional committee meetings as to how to do it. Talk to John. He'll tell you.
Tom Brotherton—I have a condition item that's very specific. When we had the earthquake all the lights
went out. I'd go through Tukwila and I drove through Kent. Tukwila worked out a lot better than Kent.
It stopped everything even though lights were out because at every intersection in Tukwila there was a
city employee directing traffic. A man with a hard hat. Everyone in the city apparently was out directing
traffic. Their emergency plan called for—here's your intersection, you go to it and take care of the traffic
here. People from utilities,police, and fire, everyone was out there. That seems like a worthwhile
innovation.
• Mike Martin—Certainly someone could look at it. It carries with it certain liability but in an emergency
situation like that......
Tom Brotherton—Do we have enough employees? Especially if people who have trucks and radios get
out and do that sort of thing if that's part of the emergency plan, they may have other high priority things
to do, but at least.....
Steve Mullen—If the corridors don't work, then you just move the bottleneck. Don proposed that we
develop a plan over the next five years that if we change out to a battery back up system and change our
signal heads from incandescent bulbs to LEDs, we can actually operate that signal for about 5-6 hours on
battery power. So we're looking at doing that. It's not a real cheap fix because it involves a lot of
retrofitting on signal heads. I was amazed at how well people did cooperate, and people knew in a crisis,
you cooperate and get along, and I agree we were pretty fortunate. There is a couple of different ways
dealing with that. One would be the battery back up system. The other would be to consider having more
employees out directing traffic.
Tom Brotherton- Start with the quickest one and go to the long term one eventually—fade it in. One of
the other things that I've seen other places is asymmetric roads and I think that maybe Washington and
Central might count that way, even pulsating much stronger or more concentrated in flow. I wonder about
actually going to asymmetric roads instead of having 2 —2— 1, maybe we need 3 -2. Maybe that would
work on some selected roads,but the question is(it's just one possibility when you do your studies) do
0you look at alternative structural configurations as well as just type light timing?
Steve Mullen—Yes. I don't know if there are any new ideas in traffic. There's a lot of ideas been tried
somewhere before. The advantage we have of having a professional organization ITE is that we share
Council Workshop Minutes, 8/21/01 10
that information. So we gain the benefit of learning from someone else's mistakes instead of having to
make those mistakes ourselves, because sometimes there's a pretty expensive retrofit. I think what you're
actually talking about is reversible lanes. And those can work,but they are extremely cumbersome
operationally to make work and they don't work well a lot of times because it's a compromise. That
center line has to work in both direction and you flip that around and, for a period of time, nobody gets to
use it, and when you have a reversible lane you just lost your left turn lane. We do look at those kinds of
things, and are reluctant to call them innovations,but we look at lots of possibilities, and so if somebody
comes up with a bright idea that works for them we're going to look at it. We'll look at the ideas that
seem like they should have worked and they didn't work in that particular locale and maybe they'd work
here. So we do consider something else. Yes.
Tom Brotherton—Have you done studies on roundabouts? It's expensive now to retrofit. Some of our
worst intersections might benefit from being roundabouts.
Steve Mullen—I'm very enthused about roundabouts —the right application. The difficulty is that they
take a lot of space. So we're in a constrained area and it's extremely expensive to retrofit an intersection
from a signal to a roundabout,but certainly adding roundabouts as a potential treatment for intersection
control rather than just relying on a traffic signal is a possibility. As you are probably aware,we were
considering one at 41h and Willis where we have a signal and the roundabout would function much, much
better than the signals. It's an extremely expensive thing to retrofit where there's not a full problem right
now. But we are considering roundabouts as a potential solution rather than just relying on signals. We
continue to endeavor options on how to do things.
• The workshop adjourned.
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