Parkwood Hills Entrance UPDATE
Several residents of Parkwood Hills expressed concern about the number of accidents at the entrance to Parkwood Hills. I asked for a meeting with the county folks who "own" the road. Thank you to Assistant County Administrator Mary Callier, Commission President Paul Wilson, Commissioner Judy Ohly, County Traffic Engineer Mike Sheehan, County Public Works Traffic Design Engineer Kay Bieniek, City Traffic Engineer David Kramer, and City Traffic Accident Specialist Wayne Winter for sharing their time and assistance this morning.
The net of the meeting is that we all agreed that we need to do something to reduce the number of rear-end collisions when making left hand turns into Parkwood Hills but the solution (or a realistic one) is still in the future.
Our number one solution would be to widen the road at the entrance to allow for a left hand turn lane and a bypass lane. The bike path on the north side of Viola precludes our doing this easily. After much discussion of alternatives we are going to look at widening the road on the south side but this will take a considerable amount of engineering --- work which we couldn't commit to doing yet this year.
One of the future projects looked at while discussing the sales-tax extention refernedum in October is improvement to Viola Road -- widening, curbs, and storm water drainage. This would be an opportune time to make the entrance change.
At this time, nothing is committed and we will continue to look for a way to address your concerns.
I've asked Mr. Winter to provide me with statistics on just who has been causing the rear-ending accidents. Because the frequency is largely during the school year, we suspect that they are Century HS students. If this is truly the case, I will take these statistics to Century HS and see if we can't do something to work with the students to prevent serious injury to themselves and others.
Any help you can provide would be appreciated. Thanks.
The net of the meeting is that we all agreed that we need to do something to reduce the number of rear-end collisions when making left hand turns into Parkwood Hills but the solution (or a realistic one) is still in the future.
Our number one solution would be to widen the road at the entrance to allow for a left hand turn lane and a bypass lane. The bike path on the north side of Viola precludes our doing this easily. After much discussion of alternatives we are going to look at widening the road on the south side but this will take a considerable amount of engineering --- work which we couldn't commit to doing yet this year.
One of the future projects looked at while discussing the sales-tax extention refernedum in October is improvement to Viola Road -- widening, curbs, and storm water drainage. This would be an opportune time to make the entrance change.
At this time, nothing is committed and we will continue to look for a way to address your concerns.
I've asked Mr. Winter to provide me with statistics on just who has been causing the rear-ending accidents. Because the frequency is largely during the school year, we suspect that they are Century HS students. If this is truly the case, I will take these statistics to Century HS and see if we can't do something to work with the students to prevent serious injury to themselves and others.
Any help you can provide would be appreciated. Thanks.
posted by Bob Nowicki | 2:52 PM
1 Comments:
In the interim, while waiting for widening of the road to occur, could a traffic light be installed? A traffic light that would be triggered by the traffic entering from Parkwood Hills Drive? A traffic light like the on 7th Street Northeast or 11th Avenue Northeast. One of these is triggered by pedestrians and one is triggered by traffic coming from the west or east.
I think having a stoplight installed at Parkwood HIlls entrance would also help alleviate some of the problems for the Northern Heights area trying to make a left turn onto Viola. Many accidents have occured there also.
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