Dozens of Issaquah citizens gathered in Tibbetts Creek Manor Monday night to identify troublesome crosswalks at a community meeting for pedestrian safety.
Mayor Fred Butler called the meeting a forum for a back-and-forth interaction between citizens and government that wasn’t possible in city council public comment regarding the July 26 death of 4-year-old Haochen Xu on Newport Way Northwest, outside the Summerhill neighborhood.
“This evening our first team is here to listen and hear from you,” Butler said in a statement at the top of the night.
Butler added that he expected new applications for development along Newport to change the nature of the corridor and potentially necessitate lower speed limits, eliciting applause from the audience.
Some residents said they expected the community meeting’s dialogue to take the form of a group discussion with the city’s staff, elected officials and hired transportation consultants.
Instead the meeting took the form of an open house in which those same city parties set themselves up next to maps of Issaquah neighborhoods and took notes as Issaquahns pointed out which intersections they believed to be unsafe for pedestrians.
That data will be compared against traffic and accident data recorded by Issaquah police and other city departments to determine which crosswalks are in need of safety improvements, said Victor Salemann, the principal for Transportation Solutions, Inc.
TSI will additionally set up cameras to record activity at city intersections in real time.
“Instead of standing out there and watching all day, we can watch the footage at high speed and slow it down when we see someone approach,” Salemann said. “Then we can look and go, OK, did they press the crosswalk button before they crossed the street? If so, did cars stop at the signal?”
That data will be distilled into a preliminary report to be released in September.
The data collection at the open house — which consisted of residents sticking pins at problem intersections — revealed several popularly despised roadways beyond Newport Way Northwest.
Martin Buckley and Grania Buckley said one pedestrian thruway south of Clark Elementary was nearly invisible, and that drivers in the area would travel well above the posted speed limit.
“We’ve all almost been hit on this crosswalk,” Martin Buckley said.
Other hot spots included a “choke point” on West Lake Sammamish Parkway east of 194th Avenue Southeast — where a neighborhood wall forces parallel parkers to block available pedestrian pathways, nearby resident and city council candidate Tim Flood said — and the Highlands intersection of Northeast Park Drive and Northeast Federal Drive.
One intersection that attracted particular ire was the Issaquah Commons private road intersection with Maple Street Northwest. Notes about the road, which connects to Target and Trader Joe’s, identified the need for a four-way stop, and pointed out the brick overlay of the private throughway made crosswalks difficult to identify.
C.A. Christensen said he was almost hit at that intersection several years ago.
“It was pretty close,” Christensen said. “Within inches, I’d say.”
Christensen has contacted the city about the intersection several times with little response, he said. He said he was one of the meeting attendees who had hoped for a public group dialogue.
“What people wanted was more of a question and answer period,” he said. “If everyone reports these things separately, they seem isolated.”
