Rural Route Overburdened With Commuter Traffic, Bigelow Gulch Road May Be Widened

Times have changed for Arnie Fichtenberg.

For nearly 30 years, the Orchart Prairie farmer puttered along at 15 mph in his combine over the winding hills of Bigelow Gulch Road.

This road once less traveled between Fichtenberg’s home and his family’s wheat and barley fields a mile away now carries 16,000 vehicles a day.

Now, cars line up like a convoy behind Fichtenberg as he maneuvers his farm machinery down the two-lane country road.

“It seems like rush hour starts at 2 p.m. and runs until 6,” Fichtenberg said. “They’ll honk, shake their fists, even flip you off.”

Hoping to calm the commotion, transportation officials are looking to turn two-lane Bigelow Gulch Road into a four-lane arterial able to handle the increasing commuter and truck traffic.

Bigelow Gulch Road, which twists and turns across the rolling Pleasant and Orchard prairies, links the Spokane Valley and Spokane’s North Side and is one segment of what could become a piecemeal beltway around the metropolitan area.

Spokane County officials say widening existing roads, and then building connections between them, is a relatively inexpensive way to handle the growing volume of traffic moving between the North Side, the Valley and elsewhere in the area.

It’s cheaper than building either the proposed North Spokane Freeway or a beltway from scratch.

“We’re looking at it a little more realistic,” said Ross Kelley, assistant county engineer. “We want to come up with buildable and usable pieces (of road) as close to the existing right-of-way.”

Improving existing roads and then linking them together in a system of what transportation officials call “urban connectors” would cost an estimated $182 million.

Add to that the estimated $300 million cost of building a light-rail system between downtown Spokane and the Valley and it’s still little more than half the estimated $875 million it would cost to build the North Spokane Freeway.

The plan to build a series of urban connectors has support from County Commissioner Kate McCaslin, a member of the Spokane Regional Transportation Council, which is studying the proposal.

“This is a much more efficient way of getting people all over the county in a way they want to go” than building the North Spokane Freeway, she said.

Transportation officials say the area’s biggest traffic-flow problem is between the North Side and the Spokane Valley.

A 1995 Washington State Department of Transportation study shows that 52 percent of the commercial trucks coming to Spokane from the north, including Canada, are either destined for the Valley or will swing through it as part of their eastbound route.

In an effort to avoid downtown and the Spokane area freeway traffic, many of those trucks use two-lane Bigelow Gulch Road to get there.

Preliminary plans call for widening the road to four lanes, smoothing out those trademark hills and straightening hairpin turns. Bigelow Gulch Road would eventually connect to Sullivan Road and the freeway via an improved Forker Road. All that work would cost an estimated $20 million.

Fichtenberg said he’d love to see the two-lane road widened. “I’d have a place to pull over,” he said.

But others living along Bigelow Gulch are upset.

“What it is, basically, is a trucking lane all the way from Montana,” said Tana Trobaugh, who lives on the corner of Bigelow Gulch and Weile roads.

The proposed road-widening project would take out a chunk of her front yard and bring even more traffic through the rural area, she said.

“This rural strip is the last vestige, and I don’t know how to hang on to it,” said Trobaugh, who lives in a turn-of-the-century home that once belonged to her grandmother. “I feel a great sense of loss.”

But commuters from both the Valley and the North Side are cheering for some kind of relief from clogged Interstate 90, which carries up to 115,000 cars per day, almost double its capacity.

“Instead of unwinding after work, you wind up,” said commuter Dave Mudd, who refuses to take Interstate 90.

Mudd, who lives on North Ella in the West Valley area and commutes to work at the Rosauers grocery store in the Five Mile Plaza shopping center, makes his 20-minute workday commute via Bigelow Gulch.

“It’s more leisurely. It’s less stressful than driving the freeway with bumper-to-bumper traffic and stopping every five blocks downtown,” Mudd said.

During rush hour, “I’m mumbling under my breath,” he said.

The same is true for commuters heading the opposite way.

Having an alternative to I-90 “would be a great relief,” said Jacob Laete, who lives off Highway 395 near Hatch Road and drives 25 miles to his job at Hewlett Packard in Liberty Lake.

Laete doesn’t like to take Bigelow Gulch Road because he believes it’s too narrow, winding and hilly - in short, too dangerous.

“If only there was a magical way to extend (direct) routes” between the North Side and the Valley, he said.

The county has tentative plans for other connector routes in the area.

A four-lane urban connector would swing north from Airway Heights on the West Plains to Nine Mile Falls, then turn east toward Mead, and then head southeast to Otis Orchards and Liberty Lake.

Another urban connector might follow 57th and 32nd avenues to link the South Hill with the Valley.

For commuters like Mudd and Laete, however, it could be a decade or more before there’s a clear shot between the North Side and the Valley.

For now, Laete, said, “I listen to the radio to get my mind off of it.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)