SNOHOMISH — One of the city’s solutions for the residential street of Terrace Avenue is making it a “shared road” where oncoming cars have to pull over behind bikes and pedestrians.
The proposal was explained during the Sept. 19 City Council meeting.
One side would be for cars, one side would be for bicycles and pedestrians, but if two cars meet each other, the car heading north would be expected to pull over into the shared bike and pedestrian lane. The car driver would be expected to yield to any bikes or pedestrians in the lane if it’s occupied.
Meanwhile, at 16th and Terrace, the city is weighing a few ideas. One option is a mini-roundabout.
A public open house meant for neighbors on all of this is Wednesday, Oct. 18 at 6 p.m. in the Carnegie Building, First and Cedar.
The city would intend to implement the shared road in the coming months by painting new road lines and adding signage.
Traffic is expected to get heavier once a large single-family housing development opens at the former Delta Rehabilitation Center site; construction is ongoing and it’s been renamed from “Walsh Hills” to “Woodberry Hills” by developers D.R. Horton. Neighbors have asked the city for more than a year for safety solutions.
The neighborhood and its narrow streets were developed in the 1960s, and there is no sidewalk. Instead, there is a ditch alongside.
City traffic engineers say the traffic levels will stay low enough to allow a shared road design.
16th Street and Terrace Avenue are scheduled to be repaved in either 2025 or 2026, which could be when the public can speak up again on whether to keep the shared road design.
In coming years, the city will add a connector road at 22nd Street, which is at the north end of Terrace Avenue.
Kalamazoo, Michigan earlier this year tried a similar “shared road” device on a much more heavily trafficked road, but removed it within a few weeks.
Public works director Nova Heaton said last month that, overall, the city needs to think outside the box to get away from car-centric roads to meet the needs of all road users in the community. Later this month, Heaton anticipates presenting to council on multi-modal streets that better accommodate bicyclists and pedestrians.
Woodberry Hills is 111 new single-family homes being built tightly within 20 acres of land. The neighborhood is being marketed, for one, as having “easy access to Everett, Bothell, and Bellevue.”
The former Delta Rehabilitation Center, also known as the Snohomish Chalet, was uniquely the state’s only skilled rehabilitation center for brain-injured adults. It closed right before the start of the 2020 pandemic. Changes in Medicaid reimbursement for patient care fell below the cost of care, straining the budget further and causing the Chalet to struggle to stay afloat. Its closure displaced 103 residential patients with brain injuries. The Walsh family ran it from the late 1960s to its end.
