County Is Counting On Traffic

If drivers tooling through the Spokane Valley feel as if they’re being watched these days, it’s because they are.

County road crews are counting traffic throughout the Valley this summer.

They’ve installed traffic recording devices - metal boxes with rubber lines that stretch across the road - at various intersections, including McDonald and Saltese.

The boxes record each car that rolls over the lines.

“You’ll be seeing those things popping up all over,” said Phil Barto, operations manager for the county engineer’s office. “We’re trying to get a good idea of what kind of traffic we’ve got.”

The county makes such counts every couple of years, Barto said. It helps them plan maintenance schedules and improvement projects, he said.

It doesn’t mean that a traffic light will be going up at an intersection where counts are being made or that the road is scheduled to be repaved any time soon, though, said Bob Brueggeman, the county’s traffic engineer.

It just means the county is counting, he said.

“It’s just updating our database, that’s all,” Brueggeman said.

Crews will be installing only one new traffic light in the Valley this summer.

The intersection of Argonne and Liberty in Millwood is scheduled to get a light before the end of August, Brueggeman said.

Millwood officials requested the light because some town residents are having a tough time getting onto Argonne from Liberty, one of Millwood’s chief east-west streets, he said.

The news of another signal on that stretch of Argonne is sure to illicit groans from some commuters. The section, with its numerous traffic lights and frequent train delays, is a notorious snarl already.

Brueggeman said crews will try to time the light so it corresponds to the others on Argonne.

“We don’t want to delay traffic on Argonne any more than we have to,” he said.

Construction workers also have begun work on the long-awaited underpass at Argonne and Trent. That project will allow traffic to pass under the railroad tracks there unimpeded by trains.

Work on that project is expected to take two years.

, DataTimes