Expect delays
— from Shannon Wilbur, San Juan County Public Works —
On Monday, March 25, construction begins.
This week, the Contractor is mobilizing equipment.
Next week, clearing and installation of temporary stormwater erosion control materials near Nordstroms Lane will take place.
Works hours are 7 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday,
Expect delays of up to 15 minutes.
Please drive carefully through the construction work zone and thank you for your patience.
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Guardrails? Isn’t it pretty flat there? I’ve been told by bikers that they dislike guardrails because it “puts them in the middle,” as it were.
This will be wonderful! We will all be able to drive MUCH FASTER!!! Good planning by the County…
There will only be about 1100 feet of guardrail; 400 feet on the outside of the 90 degree curve at Swan Road, and 700 feet opposite the big rock bluff just north of McNallie Lane.
Kudos to Rick Hughes and the San Juan County Council for making this project happen! This section of road will now finally accommodate motor vehicles, bicyclists and pedestrians safely.
The plans for this project can be found at https://www.sanjuanco.com/DocumentCenter/View/18194/CRP-021402-Orcas-Road-Improvements-Final-Plans
Here’s the rub; if we had opted for the 35mph speed limit we wouldn’t have needed to take down SO MANY trees. What’s the rush, people? Why do we need to go 40mph; can we not insist on lesser speed limits and let the cops pick off the speeders to make money for the County?
I distinctly remember a Public Works “workshop” at the fire hall some years back where we insisted we DID NOT WANT an increase in speed limit – why is the Public will, when it comes to road “improvements,” always discounted and disregarded? That person would not listen and now we have this…Why even ask us if some agenda we don’t want is going to be forced down our throats anyway?
This is what happens when you take the “easy” state and fedreal grant monies. There are strings attached that no one wants.
35 vs. 40 mph is a strawman argument. Our roads were built for the traffic of 75 years ago! They are unsafe at any speed! And the San Juan County law now is that any road improvement must be up to code with four foot paved shoulders for bicycles and pedestrians. Have you noticed the huge increase in cyclists and walkers?
We all like trees and there are more trees on Orcas now than ever in history. But we can enjoy them in the forest and not within inches of busy roads!
@Dan Christopherson; I think we can agree to disagree on this one. It’s not at all true that speed doesn’t make a difference. It’s why when you take Drivers Ed they tell you how many car lengths you need to be behind a car, and that distance exponentially increases with speed. Higher speed for cars = more accidents and fatalities involving pedestrians, wildlife, and other vehicles. I see road kill all the time around town. I never used to. Should we tell deer, pheasants, wild turkeys, and other creatures who were here long before us to get with the times and make way for humans only? I really don’t understand where you are coming from; I’m trying, but I don’t.
One Size Fits All should not apply to every road on Orcas. I don’t think we need 70′ wide roads with all the bells and whistles in town and everywhere else on Orcas. In Eastsound and surround, the number of trees are not “more than ever in history.” Historically, Eastsound was a forested wetland watershed. The island, before the fir tree logging “boom” in the 1800s, was mixed-forest – not just Douglas fir mono-crop.
We have more bicycles and pedestrians because: 1) tourism is pushed harder than ever and there are more people 2) people are in denial about the topography of Orcas Island, which has been touted as a “bicycle” island by the tourist industry. Lopez and San Juan are a little more bicycle-friendly due to topography and visibility as much as anything else – they are flatter. 3) Eastsound Village’s original vision in the first Comp Plan in the 1990s was for a “walking/biking” village core – now it is a mess in every way; conflicting land uses, Port about to expand footprint of airport, roads cut through everywhere; no code enforcement, vacay rental craziness: all of this has destroyed Eastsound Swale and threatens to destroy a lot more habitat on the rest of the island. We humans are not very good at “dominion.” We think it’s “domination.” It isn’t. I don’t want to see this place concretized everywhere. I want to see off-road or next-to- road biking and walking trails. I don’t understand why you are so against this.
Dan, maybe what you would like to see as someone who potentially benefits financially from every cyclist that comes to Orcas and what the community wants or needs as far as “road improvements” are concerned are quite different… just a thought.
As a person who commutes on that road 4 days a week, sometimes by bicycle, I can say that very few people drive the posted speed limit, whether 35 or 40 mph. On the straight stretch I am often passed by cars going 60 mph. As a bicycle rider I have been passed by cars on the blind corners more times than I care to think about. I don’t know if the road improvements will result in people driving faster. I hope that they make the road safer.
Our roads are most certainly NOT “unsafe” at any speed. They are country roads, and people have been driving them without incident for a century. Please don’t cite any alcohol- drug- or excessive speed-related accidents in rebuttal. They will occur regardless. All that our previous County Engineer could come up with at that intersection was a driver who died of a heart attack (or similar) crashing as a result. How many cars with sober responsible drivers have navigated the terrors of the dogleg? Hundreds of thousands.
I have been lobbying for a lower speed limit on Schaefer’s Stretch for years, and just have gotten lip service from out councilman. The jerks who have been terrorizing our area of the island for years will be happy to know they can go even faster with the new road. Slowing down does help, and anyway, where are we going in such a hurry?
We all agree that higher speed for cars equals more accidents and fatalities involving pedestrians, wildlife, and other vehicles (including bicycles). And on the straight Schaefer Stretch (which is not part of the road project and remains extremely narrow) cars sometimes do go 60 mph. But this project will reduce the many accidents that have occured at the Nordstrom Road corner (including the recent one where the young woman was killed) and make this road much safer for all.
We don’t need four foot paved shoulders and elimination of sharp corners on every road on Orcas. But we absolutely do need it on Orcas Road, our major high-volume-traffic road from the ferry landing to Moran State Park.
We have more bicycles and pedestrians because people are finally realizing that this way of travel is non-polluting, healthy and recreational. And now electric bikes are becoming very popular here because they make riding our Orcas hills very easy! Expect to see a major increase in bike traffic by both tourists and locals on Orcas in the near future. We need infrastructure to accommodate them, both on the road shoulders (which experienced cyclists prefer), and also separate off-the-road bike paths that are well maintained, for more casual cyclists.
The Orcas community ranked the need for bicycle accommodation toward the top of the list because most of us acknowledge that there is a problem with our old dangerous roads and bicycles are not going away. That is why most Orcas people support this project. Now we just have to be patient with the construction inconvenience for a little while.
I have lived on this corner for 18 years, and the amount of accidents is very small. They all involved speed and impaired driving.
What happens this summer with the ferry traffic? Will it be rerouted to Crow Valley Road or will lines of cars be sitting and idling for up to 15 minutes?
One of our illustrious commenters made me realize that I need to edit my above comment. It should read: “Many of our most busy roads are unsafe at any speed over 20 mph!” They were built for a small fraction of our current traffic, when very few islanders or tourists rode bikes or walked on them.
Would you want your elementary school age kids or grandkids to ride their bikes on our roads like we did at their age?
This road project will take a section of Orcas Road that “…people have been driving…for a century” and bring it up to safe standards for the high traffic volume it now has.
During construction, instead of putting up with “lines of cars sitting and idling for up to 15 minutes” you may want to drive Crow Valley Road; or Dolphin Bay Road if the two miles of gravel and potholes aren’t too bad.
Thanks Dan, I will be “putting up” with them as they will be parked right in front of my house.