Othello City Council to discuss traffic

OTHELLO — Othello residents are invited to the July 12 Othello City Council meeting to discuss traffic, the city’s collision rate and options being considered to slow down traffic.

City engineer Shawn O’Brien said council members will receive a recommendation for a pilot project, which could start later this year, to see if proposals designed to slow down drivers do what they’re supposed to do. The pilot project would install traffic circles at each intersection in a residential area and study the result, O’Brien said.

The recommendation for traffic circles comes from the Othello Planning Commission, which studied the problem and possible solutions for about seven months before deciding on a proposal.

“We’re looking at something simple that we can try out and see if it works,” O’Brien said.

The “traffic circle” isn’t a circle. It’s more of a diamond, and cars have to maneuver around it, which requires drivers to slow down, he said.

The planning commission also is recommending “traffic cushions” and raised crosswalks on streets around parks and schools, both on existing streets and for future development. A traffic cushion resembles a speed bump, but extends all the way across the traffic lane.

The planning commission started studying traffic flow and collision rates after city officials received a request from a developer to reduce the width of streets in a new development from 40 feet (the current standard) to 36 feet. City planner Anne Henning said city officials decided to review street standards, and that led to some surprises.

“We discovered our accident rate is quite high,” Henning said.

Mayor Shawn Logan echoed that.

“We have a really high accident rate here in Othello, especially when compared to other cities our size,” Logan said.

It’s also an issue of pedestrian safety, Logan said.

Statistics showed Othello had 404 collisions from 2016 to 2019, the last year for which data was available. The collisions resulted in 99 injuries. O’Brien provided a comparison between Othello and other towns, the same size and larger, throughout the state. Selah, as an example, has about the same population and had 210 collisions in the same time frame. Ephrata had 286 from 2016 to 2019, and Quincy had 144.

Logan said a lot of the collisions seem to be caused by people taking shortcuts through residential neighborhoods, rather than using the streets designed for heavier traffic.

In his presentation to the council at the June 7 meeting, planning commission chair Chris Dorow showed a comparison map of collisions in Othello and Selah in 2019. Othello had more and the collisions were spread throughout town. In Selah, the collisions were concentrated on the most heavily traveled streets.

O’Brien said the planning commission recommended staying with the 40-foot-wide streets to maintain consistency throughout town. The council’s water/sewer/streets committee, however, will recommend reducing the minimum width to 36 feet.

There’s a perception that wider streets are safer, O’Brien said, but studies haven’t supported that conclusion.

“You drive faster and you don’t even know it,” he said. “That little extra speed produces more impact and more severe impact.”

The ultimate decision will be up to the council, which can accept or reject any of the recommendations.