On a cold and rainy Tuesday afternoon, a sparse but regular flow of traffic rolled up and down NE Park Drive, one of the main thoroughfares in the Issaquah Highlands.

Highlands resident and community association board member TK Panni and Issaquah Police Cmdr. Scott Behrbaum stood near the intersection of 24th Ave. NE and NE Park Drive, which is posted at a 25 mph speed limit.

Panni watched anxiously as a BMW quickly approached the intersection near them.

“I believe enforcement has slowed them down, but those are short memories,” he said.

After years of clamoring for effective measures to slow motorists down, Panni and others are asking for more traffic-calming measures for Park Drive, laced with intersections with residential streets, and busy with traffic to and from the nearby Grand Ridge Elementary School.

Behrbaum and IPD traffic officers John Linder and Andy Rohrbach know the area well, returning again and again over the years with LIDAR speed detections guns and issuing tickets to speeding vehicles – as they did while The Reporter looked on, Nov. 17.

But even Behrbaum admitted that enforcement could only go so far, and traffic, like water, always found a new, easier way through to its destination.

“If you introduce enough volume into a neighborhood, it’s going to find a way through it,” he said.

When the Highlands was built over a decade ago, NE Park Drive was designed to utilize multiple forms of transportation on the roads, including bicycle lanes, adequate sidewalks and capacity for public transportation. It was always intended to be busy with the compact, mixed use development on the eastern end and rows of townhomes lining the road as it sloped westward down past Grand Ridge Elementary.

But Panni said vehicles traveling at a high rate of speed were posing an unnecessary danger to pedestrians and casual cyclists like himself who were supposed to use the bike lanes.

“We’re forced to ride our bikes on the sidewalk,” he said. “Slower speeds would make it safer.”

The City of Issaquah is well aware of the problem. City Public Works Engineer Todd Christensen has been working on the perceived speeding problem there for years.

Part of the problem lies with the fact that Park Drive is considered an arterial street. According to the city, an estimated 13,000 vehicles use the road on a daily basis.

In 2007, the city decided to amend the speed limit on the eastern segment of Park Drive down to Grand Ridge Elementary from 30 mph down to 25 mph and extended the fog lines that run along the edge of the road down to the intersection of 15th Avenue Northeast.

Under the city’s Neighborhood Traffic Calming Overriding Policies, a number of additional measures have already been installed on Park Drive: landscaped medians, choke-points and a speed radar sign near the intersection with 15th Avenue Northeast.

But additional calming measures aren’t warranted, said Christensen, because motorists weren’t exceeding the speed limit by enough velocity to trigger the program.

“Unfortunately, NE Park Drive does not meet the criteria as identified in our traffic calming program to provide further traffic calming devices,” he wrote in a letter to Panni on July 8.

For his part, Panni feels there are substantial gaps in the traffic calming measures, and the standard of 85 percent of motorists over 10 mph above the speed limit is a standard too high. If that’s the standard, he said, then that should be changed as well.

“People still aren’t conscious of their speed,” he said.