Traffic Engineer John Marek presented the annual traffic report to the Mountlake Terrace City Council during its May 22 meeting.

Joined by Public Works Director Gary Schimek, Marek said that the report not only helps the city identify trends that need to be addressed but also aids in developing capital improvement projects and securing funding.

Traffic speed and volume

Marek stated that this year, the data was collected through a subscription service. It’s one of many available and collects traffic data nationwide via smartphone applications and smart vehicles.The data is cleaned of any personal information, Marek said, and one cannot track a specific person or group.

“We can get traffic speed and volumes for any street in the city going back to 2017,” Marek said.

 

Six segments were chosen to show the changes in traffic volume over the years: 44th Avenue West, 56th Avenue West, 66th Avenue West, 212th Street Southwest, 220th Street Southwest and 236th Street Southwest.

Marek stated that the volume for those streets shows a dip during the pandemic in 2020, followed by a rise as safety measures were lifted, which is “similar across the country.”

However, “when you look at traffic speeds, um, it’s a little bit flipped,” Marek said.

In 2020 and 2021, speeds increased, Marek said, giving the graph a bell curve rather than a valley, with the average speed rising.

An example that Marek provided was 44th Avenue West, where the speed limit is 30 mph. He explained that 85% of drivers were driving approximately 37 mph and that increased to around 38 mph during the pandemic. However, as more vehicles returned to the road, speeds started to decrease.

Marek said the possible reason for this bell curve is that drivers tend to travel at the speeds at which they are most comfortable. If a driver is familiar with a street, he said, they may be more likely to speed.

“When our volumes were low and there was less friction between drivers, our speeds went up,” Marek said. “And now that we’re getting that friction back, those speeds are starting to drop back down.”

Marek added that the sample section of 44th Avenue West has four lanes, which may enhance drivers’ comfort level for higher speeds.

Showing roughly the same travel speeds was 212th Street Southwest; however, as Marek pointed out, the speed limit is 35.

“The remaining streets are all posted at 30, we’re seeing 85th percentile speeds about 5 miles an hour over,” Marek said. “So, probably a little faster than what we’d like to see.”

Councilmember William Paige Jr. pointed out that the samples were also popular shortcuts for drivers from Edmonds and Lynnwood to get to Interstate 5 or Shoreline.

Marek said that the traffic monitoring service the city uses provides the driver’s origin and destination by identifying where traffic, not individual vehicles, enters and exits a municipality. However, that feature wasn’t used for this report and will be considered in the future.

Collisions

Marek explained that the collisions in the report refer only to those that occurred within the city itself, not to accidents that took place on the freeway or at the off-ramps. Even though those accidents occurred in the Mountlake Terrace footprint, they are not related to the city’s streets.

Much like traffic volume, collisions decreased during the pandemic and then rose again, Marek said. However, they haven’t returned to pre-pandemic numbers and remain lower than those of 2015, 2016 and 2017.

“These trends are not unique to Mountlake Terrace,” Marek said, and added that Seattle and Shoreline have similar collision histories.

Injury collisions are also lower than they were 10 years ago, Marek said. However, he identified something notable about 2021, when traffic volumes were low and people were traveling at higher speeds. The number of injuries was almost the same as in 2018 and 2019. Fatal collisions remain consistently low.

“You could relate that to higher speeds, greater chance of injury,” Marek said.

To see the traffic report presentation, click here.

The entire traffic report is available here.

In other business, the city council voted to pull the award for the Ballinger Park Viewing Platform and Trails project from the June 5 consent calendar. The proposal was to add $1,035,593.02 to the project, bringing the total to $2,583,405.24 for construction and contingency to the contract with Sunset Grill Construction LLC.

Parks Project Manager Donnelle Dayao said the city issued a call for bids in March and received three responses that exceeded the city’s proposal. The lowest bidder was Sunset Grill, at $2.2 million, with an 8% contingency, which brings the total cost to approximately $2.4 million.

Dayao said the staff worked to evaluate options to fund the project, including the Conservation Office, the City of Edmonds and Premiera Blue Cross. The proposal reallocates capital improvement funds from projects that were completed under budget or are no longer moving forward, which would add approximately $1 million to the Lake Ballinger project.

No new funding is being requested of the council.

The options Dayao presented to the council were to proceed with the proposal, reject the bids and break the project into segments, and rebid individually. Additionally, segmenting the project could result in changes to recreation and conservation funds, as the project scope has been modified.

“The drawbacks of rebidding or segmenting are we don’t really know if bids would come in any lower,” Dayao said.

Other drawbacks, Dayao said, included the risk of losing funding from the city’s partners and having to request extensions, as well as requesting permit extensions from the Army Corps of Engineers.

The city council voted to remove the item from the consent calendar for further discussion and a separate vote during the June 5 business meeting.

The presentation material can be seen here.

The city council approved the on-call agreement with Parametrix for coating and repainting the water tower, as well as a few other tasks that Public Works needs to be done.

Not only will the utility maintenance outsourcer repaint the outside of the 2.5-million-gallon water reservoir, but they will also proceed with the seismic retrofit and internal coating, which protects the steel water tank from rusting with a rubber-like, potable water-safe layer.

The council will hold its next business meeting at 7 p.m., June 5, at Mountlake Terrace City Hall, 23204 58th Ave. W., Mountlake Terrace. To attend the meeting online, visit zoom.us/join and enter meeting ID 810 1113 9518; no passcode is needed.

To make a public comment remotely, complete the registration form within 24 hours of the meeting’s start.

To listen via telephone, call 1-253-215-8782 and enter the same meeting ID.

You can also view livestreamed meetings and past video recordings at www.youtube.com/cityofmlt.

The agenda can be viewed here.