Tree Blocks View of Newly Installed Flashing Crosswalk Beacon Near Important Fairhaven Bus Stop
The City of Bellingham has been wrapping up multimodal improvements on 12th Street and Finnegan Way. But there are some new problems to resolve.
As the City of Bellingham kicks off Padden Creek fish passage reconstruction efforts and temporarily closes a long stretch of the Interurban Trail in Fairhaven, crews have wrapped up most of the nearby construction associated with the 12th Street and Finnegan Way Multimodal Projects. Those improvements have included new sidewalks, curb cuts, and crosswalks at three intersections. Although a planned new traffic signal at 12th Street & Mill Avenue has not yet been installed, pairs of solar-powered, push-button Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons (RRFBs) were added last week to crosswalks at Finnegan Way & Knox Avenue and 12th Street & McKenzie Avenue.
The new flashing beacons will certainly help improve crosswalk safety, especially at night since parts of the corridor are dimly lit. But there’s a problem with the RRFB on the southwest corner of 12th & McKenzie, adjacent to the Bellingham & Whatcom County Housing Authorities' Chuckanut Square apartment building and the Whatcom Transit Authority’s bus stops near the Fairhaven Haggen grocery store, an important transfer point for WTA Routes 1 and 14.
Although the two RRFBs at 12th & McKenzie are clearly visible to motorists heading southbound on 12th Street through Fairhaven, the line of sight for northbound motorists on 12th Street, coming from Old Fairhaven Parkway and Chuckanut Drive, is obstructed by an unfortunately positioned evergreen tree between the street and sidewalk, limiting the utility of the awkwardly sited RRFB.
When WTA buses are serving the bus stop on the east side of 12th Street, they can block the view of the RRFB on that side of the street, adding to the northbound visibility and crosswalk safety issues at 12th & McKenzie. The view-obstructed RRFB on the southwest corner may also give pedestrians, including those heading to or from the adjacent WTA bus stops, a false sense of safety when stepping out onto 12th Street. If you press a flashing crosswalk beacon, it should be reasonably assumed that motorists from both directions should be able to see them flash. But that's not the case at 12th & McKenzie.
"We're currently working with the contractor to assess the sight distance for the RRFB. If it doesn't meet the current standard—meaning the RRFB should be visible from at least 155 ft upstream (south) of the crossing for northbound vehicles—then the tree will be trimmed to improve visibility," Riley Grant, communications and outreach manager for the City of Bellingham Public Works, said in an email.
From my observations regularly riding Routes 1 and 14, the City of Bellingham’s 12th Street and Finnegan Way multimodal improvements have, in some ways, made navigating a bus through Fairhaven a bit more complicated for WTA transit operators.
With the downtown-bound Route 1 bus, cutting into the bus bay at 12th Street & Mill Avenue now requires far sharper turning maneuvers due to the reconstructed curb bulb-outs at the intersection. Sometimes, serving that bus stop leads to an unintentional minor bump when transit operators make contact with the curb. The recently painted yellow curb is visibly scuffed up after a few weeks of service. It's not the end of the world of course but something the City of Bellingham could have better anticipated and accommodated.
Meanwhile, for downtown-bound Route 14 transit operators, the Mill Avenue reroute introduced in February — where the 14 reaches Harris Avenue en route to Happy Valley and Western Washington University via three new turns, at 12th & Mill, 14th & Mill, and 14th & Harris — presents other problems. When that minor reroute was implemented, I initially thought it wasn’t that big a deal.
But now I’m not so sure since the City of Bellingham's new multimodal improvements in Fairhaven. From a bus rider's perspective, it seems that multimodal improvements didn't fully consider how buses might encounter problems navigating them.
At 12th & Mill, the 14’s turn from northbound 12th Street is now far sharper and more challenging for buses to navigate, especially if a westbound motorist on Mill Avenue is waiting to turn onto 12th Street or Finnegan Way. In some situations, WTA operators on Route 14 need to let motorists waiting to turn from Mill Avenue clear the bus turning zone before they can make the right turn to head uphill toward 14th Street.
With the 14’s turn from eastbound Mill Avenue to southbound 14th Street, there are similar challenges with the bus turning zone. Motorists turning from 14th Street onto westbound Mill can’t fit through when a bus on eastbound Mill Avenue is trying to turn right onto 14th Street.
Not all WTA operators on the downtown-bound Route 14 use the reroute via Mill Avenue (though most do). Sometimes, they use the old routing and simply turn right from 12th Street to Harris Avenue, skipping the awkward Mill Avenue turns.
In my mind, the easiest fixes to better accommodate Route 14 buses would be making Mill Street one-way eastbound or shifting the 14 back to Harris Avenue between 12th and 14th streets, while prohibiting oversize vehicles, including trucks and SUVs, from parking in the problematic adjacent spaces in the 1200 block of Harris Avenue that can obstruct WTA buses from making an easy right turn from 12th Street.
Don't get me wrong: The suite of multimodal improvements in Fairhaven are appreciated, especially as a pedestrian, even with a partially obstructed RRFB at 12th & McKenzie. But there are some issues that the City of Bellingham can hopefully resolve before moving onto the next public works project.
This article has been updated with a comment from the City of Bellingham.