Council OKs Broadway revision

Citing traffic safety concerns, Spokane Valley’s City Council voted Tuesday to squeeze the number of driving lanes on two miles of busy Broadway Avenue from four to two.

The change, which will add a left-turn-only lane in the middle of the street and leave one driving lane in each direction, will be made this fall after crews resurface the thoroughfare between Bates and Sullivan roads.

New road striping will funnel cars into a single lane each way just east of Pines Road and west of Sullivan Road. Wide bike lanes will run along either curb.

Council members voting in favor of the change said they hoped the makeover would slow traffic, give bicyclists and pedestrians a safer route, and provide room for residents along Broadway to pull out of their driveways.

Essentially, the makeover will leave the two-mile stretch looking like 16th Avenue or 32nd Avenue, two other major arterials that, like Broadway, run east-west.

However, Broadway is a much busier avenue than the other two. One of the few Spokane Valley avenues to almost span the entire city from east to west, Broadway carries about 11,000 vehicles every day.

The decision, which passed 4-3, prompted a road-rage response from a dozen or so people who spoke against the move earlier.

“I’m constantly getting behind people going 20 mph, 25 mph and I can’t get around them,” said Grant Rodkey, who spoke of 16th Avenue as a traffic configuration that shouldn’t be repeated. “That creates road rage.”

Rodkey also suggested it was time for the city to enact a bike tax to go with its fuel taxes if bikes get their own lanes.

Carol Stobie, who lives on the corner of Broadway Avenue and Progress Road, told the council it would be more difficult to pull into a bike lane from her driveway than it would to pull into a lane of vehicle traffic, as she does now.

It seems counterintuitive to think two lanes of through traffic coupled with a turn lane would be safer than four, said Council member Dick Denenny, but other cities have proved three lanes to be safer.

City traffic engineers cited a Seattle study of 16 similar conversions there that reduced collisions by 27 percent, and three-lane streets in the Spokane area operate smoothly even with higher traffic volumes. Traffic on those streets actually increased after the change was made.

Council member Richard Munson disagreed. If the problem the city was trying to solve on Broadway was collisions caused by people turning left, as some said it was, then what was really needed was better intersections, he said, not single traffic lanes throughout.