Sheriff To Step Up Patrols On South Bowdish Road

Have road, will travel.

Ponderosa residents will continue to travel South Bowdish Road, county commissioners decided this week. But drivers beware: the Sheriff’s Department is being asked to step up patrols in an effort to reduce speeding along the street.

Residents of the Forest Meadows subdivision complained for several months about heavy, high-speed traffic on Bowdish between 44th Avenue and Sands Road. Much of that traffic, they said, was made up of motorists who used the residential street much like an arterial to access the nearby Ponderosa neighborhood.

Forest Meadows residents asked the county to solve the problem. Suggestions included turning Bowdish into a cul-de-sac or build a traffic median that would have restricted turns onto Bowdish.

On Tuesday, Spokane County commissioners decided to leave Bowdish as is. Rather than rerouting traffic, they will ask the Sheriff’s Department to increase daily patrols for a few weeks along Bowdish, where 1,460 cars a day drive an average 29 miles per hour. Deputies will then come back sporadically every few weeks.

“The options available to us, because of the geography of the area, are really limited,” Commissioner Kate McCaslin said.

There are only three roads that access the Ponderosa neighborhood. The county can’t close one when it should be adding more, McCaslin said. And, she added, if the county closes this road, then it would have to start closing down all roads when residents have traffic concerns.

A county survey sent to 1,500 residents of the area found little support for rerouting traffic off Bowdish. More than 75 percent of those who responded to the questionnaire said they did not want to see any changes made.

Ponderosa residents raised concerns about the already limited access to their pine-studded hillside neighborhood. Some said shutting off even one road could endanger residents during a disaster such as the first storm that burned through the area in 1991 and forced residents to evacuate.

“That makes me very nervous,” McCaslin said.

Ponderosa residents also said restricting traffic on Bowdish would not really solve the traffic problem, but only move it elsewhere.

“In all honesty, it would create more problems for people in other areas,” said Laurie Lancaster, who lives at 44th and Skipworth in the Ponderosa neighborhood. “The extra traffic would be going other places.”

Lancaster agreed with the plan to increase sheriff’s patrols in the area. “The whole area of Ponderosa needs patrolling,” she said.

Forest Meadows residents weren’t happy with the decision by the commissioners.

“The increased patrol is good, but it’s not good enough,” said Terry Striha, who lives on South Bowdish and helped lead the effort to reroute traffic. He said they need some sort of physical structure to slow down drivers - stop signs or barriers on the side of the road.

Sgt. Martin O’Leary of the Sheriff’s Department said the traffic unit would be happy to comply with a request from commissioners for added patrols in the area.

However, he warned that it may not be possible to fix the problem to everyone’s satisfaction.

“It’s fine for a while, then it’s up again and we do it over again,” he said. “That’s all anyone can do, short of closing the road.”

, DataTimes