News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Most everyone in the Sisters area — citizens, government officials, perhaps especially tourists trying to drive through town in summer — agrees that Sisters has a traffic problem. And it’s only going to get worse as the area grows in population and popularity.
It’s not nearly as easy to come up with a consensus on what to do about the problem.
Sisters City Councilors got a promise from Deschutes County commissioner Dennis Luke last Thursday that “the county is more than willing to cooperate with the city on anything you want to do.”
The problem is, the city council isn’t sure what to do. In an April 6 workshop, councilors and City Manager Eileen Stein explained the city’s quandary to county officials:
A recent Oregon Department of Transportation study found that creating a Hood Avenue/Main Avenue couplet provides only limited and temporary traffic relief — whether the streets are designated as two-way or one-way.
That’s because the Hood Avenue interchange with Cascade Avenue (Highway 20) will get clogged up. And the intersection of Cascade Avenue and Locust Street will ultimately fail even after a traffic signal is installed.
By 2015, the study shows, such a couplet starts to break down and lose its effectiveness in moving traffic. Since even starting on such a project is a couple of years down the road, that only buys five to seven years of traffic relief at best.
Stein suggests that the city may have to go back to citizens with a proposal for a “traditional” couplet on Cascade Avenue and Main Avenue. That option has been unpopular in the past, with many citizens and business owners worried that it could damage the walkability and character of downtown Sisters.
Speculation turned to creating an “alternate route” around Sisters, possibly using the old Brooks-Scanlon roadbed.
Deschutes County Senior Transportation Director Steve Jorgensen and Road Department Director Tom Blust told the councilors that state planners will not accept an “alternate route” or “bypass” as a first solution.
“The couplet work is critical,” Jorgensen said. “If you want to go somewhere else (besides downtown) you need to show justifications and reasons (why a couplet doesn’t work).”
He said that the Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) “is going to say, ‘Are you serving an urban problem with a rural solution?’ And if you are, you’d better show justification.”
Creating a route around Sisters may not be an easy sell for a variety of reasons.
Commissioner Bev Clarno said, “You’re surrounded by pristine forest, so it’s going to be harder to find a bypass that’s going to work environmentally.”
Blust noted other hurdles:
“We can draw all kinds of lines around Sisters,” he said. But the outlying areas contain developed communities such as Tollgate and Crossroads as well as forest land and planners are likely to see “a lot of resis-tance to some of those lines.”
And then there’s the financial aspect.
“We can plan all we want,” Blust said. “The struggle is going to be to get the funds to implement it.”
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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