Last chance on Atlas

By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — Public comments will be accepted until next week for a traffic study of one of Coeur d’Alene’s most heavily used transportation corridors.

The end of the comment period for the Atlas Project Traffic Impact Study — originally slated for Dec. 23 — was moved to Jan. 11 because the holidays made it difficult for people to spend time on the commenting process, said city engineer Chris Bosley.

“We didn’t want it to appear we were trying to exclude comments,” Bosley said.

In addition, the draft study, which was presented to the public at a Dec. 20 open house, wasn’t published until Jan. 2 on the city’s website.

“So people have an opportunity to comment on the draft report before it is finalized,” Bosley said.

The $88,000 study commissioned by the city and ignite cda, the city’s urban renewal agency, began as a way to gauge the impact of traffic spurred by the city’s planned development at the former Atlas Mill site on Seltice Way and surrounding thoroughfares.

The study was expanded to include a larger swath, gauging the effect of burgeoning growth in an area that includes Seltice Way as well as Northwest Boulevard from Lacrosse Avenue to the Kroc Center on Ramsey Road.

The study, which began last summer, will be finalized at the end of January. It will include public comments as well as input from agencies and state departments such as the Idaho Transportation Department and Kootenai Metropolitan Planning Organization.

So far, Bosley said many of the comments (more than 150 comments were gathered at a September open house) target six Idaho Transportation Department-operated traffic lights on Northwest Boulevard near Interstate 90. Motorists who commented don’t like how the lights are synced, cause long delays, and that they make left turns difficult. The city is in negotiations with ITD to take control of the lights.

The 324-page study includes traffic counts through intersections, trip data, volume — measured as vehicles per hour — delay time at intersections throughout the almost 2-mile area, and the length of lines comprised of vehicles waiting at intersections.

It also includes a variety of mitigation measures such as optimizing signals; building at least one new connector route on the east side of Riverstone at Lacrosse; U.S. 95 corridor improvements slated to begin next year; the proposed Huetter Road bypass that may eventually route traffic around Coeur d’Alene to U.S. 95 east of Rathdrum; interchange improvements at U.S. 95 and I-90; and incentives for large employers to stagger shifts to prevent peak-hour gridlock.

The study also used traffic and development data compiled by the Kootenai Metro Planning Organization to account for the effect of future growth outside the study area.

Many cities the size of Coeur d’Alene have more robust traffic models that can be built upon for every new proposed development, but the city doesn’t have that yet, said Phil Boyd of Welch Comer Engineers, the plan’s author. The latest study provides a starting point to build such a plan for an urban area where growth is projected to compound over the next decade.

“There’s kind of a broader transportation issue in Coeur d’Alene,” Boyd said. “As developers come onto the system in a lot of cities, there’s a transportation plan for the city, and a model that is added onto.

“If you do that each time a developer comes in, now your model becomes more accurate. That situation hasn’t existed prior to this.”

Once such a model is in place, the impact — or, the load on the system — of each subsequent development can be easily seen.

The plan can be viewed on the city of Coeur d’Alene’s website. Written comments may be submitted via email to atlastis@welchcomer.com.