The state is ready to spend $5 million

to reduce the snarl of traffic along Highway 240 in Richland, with up to half

going toward improvements at the Duportail Street intersection once the new

bridge is completed.

Plenty of Hanford commuters, drivers, cyclists and

pedestrians have weighed in on what they think the best solutions would be.

They placed stickers on a map during a recent state Department of Transportation open house to indicate the solutions they preferred, or thought would have the greatest effect on the congestion along the busy stretch of highway.

The Richland corridor covers the intersection of highways

240 and 225 to the north, near the Hanford nuclear reservation, and Interstate

182, near Queensgate Drive, to the south.

WSDOT and local partners — known as the M3 team for its

multi-agency, multi-disciplinary and multi-modal approach — developed a list of

potential solutions.

The M3 team scored each potential solution on its

effectiveness and feasibility, factoring in issues like traffic, safety, air

quality and cost. None of the offerings earned a score higher than 49.

“They were tasked within their agency to look at all

different options, not only what can you get with $5 million, but maybe, ‘What

else can we look at?’ ” said Julie West, transportation and development manager

for public works for the city of Richland.

Hanford worker Kurt Gustafson deals with the backups on a

regular basis. “I leave for work two hours early because if I leave half an

hour later than that, it’s a nightmare,” he said.

At the end of the workday, he chooses a longer route that

has fewer stops for traffic lights or slowdowns.

“It takes about the same amount of time, but with this way,

I’m driving and I’m driving and I’m driving. It’s a psychological thing,” he

said.

Gustafson and his friend Brandon Dieter attended the

mid-March open house to review the potential solutions. They added their

stickers to endorse the idea of building a bridge across the Columbia River at

the north end of Richland to connect with Pasco and Franklin County.

“I think that’s the biggest, single thing you could do,”

Dieter said.

The bridge, estimated to cost from $195 million to $260

million, would be near Washington State University Tri-Cities and Hanford High

School.

Gustafson said the proposed bridge would resolve congestion

most effectively by allowing drivers headed to Kennewick and Pasco to skip

central Richland altogether.

“If you divert a bunch of the traffic before they even get

to these points (southernmost George Washington Way), then the rest of these

solutions, I don’t think, matter as much,” Gustafson said. “Added capacity

options won’t matter if you’ve already diverted.”

Keeping traffic out of central Richland is an idea Debbie

Berkowitz supports, but she’d rather not see it come with a new bridge.

“I think there are ecological factors that aren’t being

considered,” she said.

She would rather send more traffic to the bypass highway.

“I want to see the traffic relegated from George (Washington

Way) onto the bypass so you don’t have a through-street on George. That way,

it’s just a city street. What they call, grade-separated interchanges,” she

said.

The bridge favored by Gustafson and Dieter scored 37, making

it the second-highest on the list in the “add capacity” category, just behind a

much cheaper option to add capacity between Stevens Drive-Jadwin Avenue and

I-182. This scored a 39, with an estimated cost varying from $16 million to $22

million.

The money for the traffic study and possible solutions

covered by $5 million will be paid for through the Connecting Washington

funding package, primarily sourced with an 11.9-cent state gas tax put in place

in 2016.

The overall package is expected to

raise $16 billion across the state over 16 years.

Richland received $20 million from this

same funding package toward construction of the Duportail Street Bridge, which

will connect the Queensgate area with the central part of town, near Wellsian

Way.

This bridge, currently under construction, is still in its

first of two phases, but Rudy Guercia of Richland already thinks mistakes were

made on alleviating congestion.

“The state screwed up by not requiring an overpass at

Duportail when the city put that bridge in. The state ought to tell the city,

‘Put it in.’ It shouldn’t be the state’s problem that the city was stupid.”

Guercia believes local congestion is a mess of its own

making, and that drove him to attend the open house. He believes the flow of

traffic could increase on the bypass highway if most of the intersections were

removed entirely.

“I have an iconoclastic view. My view

is that they ought to shut the traffic lights off on the bypass and force the

traffic into the city,” Guercia said. “I was talking to the county air guy, and

he doesn’t want all these cars idling. I agree with him. Take the stupid lights

out, people won’t be idling.”

Removing intersections wasn’t a solution offered by the

state, but attendees were welcome to add their own suggestions to the list.

Synchronizing the lights on the bypass

was an option. Other plans for the bypass, on the list presented to the

community, included permanently changing the direction of one northbound lane

to southbound.

With a ranking of 34, this came in just behind the bridge to

Pasco as far as effectiveness in the “added capacity” category.

Other high-ranking solutions in a category titled, “traffic

systems management and operations,” included creating a high-occupancy vehicle,

or HOV, express lane during rush hour, changing a current lane to be an HOV

lane during peak travel times, or creating two new reversible lanes that would

work similar to the express lanes on Interstate 5 in the Seattle area. The

latter option would open the new, reversible lane northbound in the morning and

then turn it southbound in the afternoon.

Many in attendance were in favor of a return to the busing

system once used to bring Hanford workers to the site.

“I think if they had Hanford-use buses again, like they used

to, and not having the parking at the 1100 Area, but in the south part of town,

or Kennewick or Pasco, it would actually free up the bypass,” Berkowitz said.

The buses were once operated by the Department of Energy and eventually phased

out.

WSDOT is committed to spending the full $5 million, but the

sky is still the limit on ideas for improving congestion.

“There are several intersection projects we can stitch

together with that $5 million,” said Paul J. Gonseth, WSDOT regional planning

engineer. “We’re going to take what people consider the most important, of the

lower cost ones, to spend that $5 million. And then we’re going to take some of

the higher suggestions and do some further study to refine them and figure out

what they will be, so we can get the big picture of what they’re going to cost.

We can then take it to the Legislature to work on finding funding.”

The state hasn’t yet determined which projects to fund,

other than spending up to $2.5 million on intersection improvements at

Duportail. Construction wouldn’t begin until next year, Gonseth said.

The state Legislature would need to approve a project like

the bridge to Pasco, which was the most expensive choice on the list of

potential solutions. But other options cost less than $50,000 and were ranked

25 and higher for their impact, including coordinating traffic signals on 240,

promoting vanpools and implementing anti-idling ordinances.

Other inexpensive solutions to increase the connectivity for

cyclists and pedestrians included creating separate bicycle lanes at Duportail

and Highway 224-Van Giesen Street, as well as relocating the Greenbelt Trail

crossing at Van Giesen to Highway 240. The most inexpensive solution on the

list was a $10,000 project to restrict northbound U-turns near the MoonRiver RV

Resort on Saint Street in north Richland.

The state also is looking at ways to

improve congestion at Aaron Drive, where traffic often backs up onto Wellsian

Way near the Richland Fred Meyer, as drivers head west on Aaron to access I-182

or 240.

Potential solutions cost between $3.4 million to $4.6

million for a roundabout, to 10 times that cost to create a grade-separated

interchange.

The recent open house was the culmination of a process that

began in September 2018 to identify the root of the congestion problem and its

possible solutions. This included two separate online surveys, with the first

including about 2,600 respondents between September and October 2018. What was

learned from this survey was that the heaviest users of the bypass, those who

travel it five or more days a week, cited “traffic” as the biggest problem in

the corridor.

Those surveyed who traveled the bypass one or fewer times a

month cited “unsafe passing” as the biggest problem.

A second survey of about 1,000 respondents took place

between November 2018 and early January 2019. About two-thirds said they drive

on the bypass five to seven days a week. The most favored solutions from this

group included adding lanes on the bypass between Stevens and Highway 225,

programming the signals on the bypass to favor traffic and building a bridge

near WSU Tri-Cities to improve the bypass from Stevens to I-182.

Now, the state and M3 team will work to refine and implement

some of the options using the $5 million currently available.

“We have a team of partners we’re working with,” Gonseth

said. “We’re going to take this information, and all the stuff that we’ve done

so far with rating projects, to them, to help filter through and find out how

to prioritize. DOT as an entity of its own will not do it.”

Larger, expensive projects will require approval by the

state Legislature. Design work on any of the initially-chosen projects will

begin this summer, with the goal of completing the work by the end of 2020.

Additionally, the city of Richland will find ways to improve

240 with another north-south option that runs parallel to the bypass, near

Kingsgate Way. Ben Franklin Transit also will look for funding to create

additional park-and-ride locations and increase vanpool use.

“Let’s use what we already have more efficiently,” Gonseth

said.