As our newly formulated City Council gets rolling on their new or remaining terms of service, this is an opportunity for councilors to focus on community needs and the role they will each play over the next two to four years in guiding Sweet Home’s future.
In the roughly 18 months I was not associated with The New Era, ending Jan. 1, a lot of things have happened in Sweet Home that have stirred controversy: the Green Peter debacle, the rather early and sudden departure of the most recent city manager, the purchase of the former Santiam Feed building by the city, the one-way streets, the stop signs…
Traffic flow may not immediately come to mind as one of those needs, but sometimes the devil is in the details.
There’s a lot of sense in locating four-way stops in front of schools – anyone who was familiar with traffic patterns at the high school and junior high prior to the arrival of the new red hexagons may recall how vehicle movement in those locations could be a little chaotic when school got out – maybe an accident waiting to happen, though they didn’t that often, thankfully.
I’m all for traffic safety, which I was reminded of recently as I tried to cross Main Street at dusk and literally had six west-bound vehicles whiz by within five feet of me as I stood at the median, none of them even touching their brakes. (The east-bound lanes had been clear, which is why I had started across.) They saw me. Frankly, they just didn’t appear to be concerned that I was standing in a crosswalk – albeit one that is very faded.
So yeah, I don’t think I take traffic safety lightly.
But even then I’m wondering what significant problems some of these signs, in particular the ones at 47th and then again at 46th on Airport, and that one at 23rd and Long, and the ones that have created a three-way stop at Elm and Mountain View – really have solved. Do they warrant the increased exhaust emissions, brake wear and annoyance they create?
An even bigger traffic flow problem, I suspect, will be the result of the soon-to-be two one-way streets in the heart of downtown Sweet Home. When they were first proposed, five or six years ago, I didn’t have a big problem with the idea, although I recognized that it could cause some inconveniences.
Using 13th Avenue as a “festival street” to draw folks to downtown events could have very positive results and providing electric vehicle charging on 10th seemed like a good idea for the age in which we live. I actually saw a car being charged there a few days ago.
They made sense until both one-ways ended up traveling southbound, from Main to Long.
When we consider that there are seven public north-south connections between Highway 228 and 22nd Avenue, a distance of nearly a mile, cutting northbound travel on two of those cut opportunities for drivers trying to get from Long to Main to five over that distance.
I don’t think the direction of travel on 13th will be as much of a problem as on 10th in terms of convenience in accessing businesses.
The direction on 10th should have been south to north, because anybody coming off the avenues literally has to drive to the East Linn Museum to get turned the right way onto Main to, say, buy a donut or a sandwich (unless you cut through a private parking lot). That also poses a problem by increasing traffic at the Long-Hwy 228 intersection, which already impedes traffic flow. Coming off of 12th from the avenues, you either have to turn left on Main and then negotiate a U-turn somewhere down the road, or hang a left on Long and drive three-quarters of a mile around the museum to get to businesses located east of Key Bank.
That is not traffic flow that supports some viable businesses in downtown Sweet Home amid all those vacant buildings.
City leaders have frequently stated that they consider it important to encourage and support downtown business development. It’s going to take attention to these little details to accomplish that goal, and being very proactive in connecting with the business community before moving too far, too fast.