Orton Junction

Orton Junction:
Impacts On the Puyallup Valley

by Maxine Herbert-Hill

TRAFFIC IMPACTS

I mentioned the traffic, but I did not mention what it will do to the roadways. 166th will have to be improved to accommodate about ten times the traffic it has now. Riverside Drive, same thing. The city can do nothing about SR162 or SR410. With the volumes of traffic on 166th and Riverside Drive, the adjacent rural areas will be contaminated beyond any ability to “mitigate.”

Let’s just do the math for a minute on the traffic. If there are even 10,000 members to the Y, that would average 1428 people per day. Let’s just say that would be about 1,000 cars per day, assuming some folks would travel together. The Y reported that their heaviest traffic is in the early morning and at the end of the workday. So most of those vehicles will be during the usual commute hours. It’s doubtful there will be that much on Sundays, but he didn’t say. So hold that thought in mind. Now add 2200 residences. If those folks are employed, that will add about 1500 more cars to the road during rush hours. If there are 1700 employees in the development, they are also trying to maneuver that same corridor. So what does that total? Y = 1,000; Residents = 1500; Employees = 1700. Total, 4200 additional vehicles per day basic commute in the bottlenecks. Not to mention the regular folks who live in the area who need to get to and from work. And not to mention the patrons for those businesses with those 1700 employees, though that would not be so much during rush hours. If we split that equally between the two interchanges, that’s an additional 2100 vehicles at each. Think we have a problem now?

I suggested that the Council needed additional information on the impact of traffic before they made this decision as it is significant and there has been essentially nothing mentioned about how it would be managed and mitigated. The Council had no comment and obviously ignored the issue.

USE BACK ARROW TO RETURN TO PRIOR PAGE POSITION OR

TOP HOME