Slow and Steady on Wallace: City Focuses on Safety

Most West Salem residents have been there, creeping along in a slow yet persistent parade of cars and trucks along Wallace Road. Each vehicle is among tens of thousands that move on this primary road each day.

For commuters heading northwest toward McMinnville, Newberg, and Yamhill County, it’s a delay both coming and going to work. For West Salem residents, it’s an orderly constant that ebbs and flows based on the time of day.

Kevin Hottmann understands. As Salem’s traffic engineer, it’s his job to make sure everyone – motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists – move as swiftly and safely as possible.

Prompted by a reader’s e-mail, The West Side Newspaper asked Hottmann to provide an update on the state of Wallace Road. His message was direct and clear: Don’t expect less traffic but count on the safest conditions possible.

“The focus on Wallace Road has changed over time,” the 26-year Salem traffic management veteran said. “We used to focus on capacity, and those ideas are changing a little bit. We're focusing more on safety now. We are looking at pedestrian and bike safety, and vehicle safety obviously. A lot of those improvements don't help with capacity.”

Residents know traffic lanes are full at peak times of day. Growth in West Salem and communities to the north continue to add more vehicles on the road. The most recent formal traffic volume study was conducted in 2011, Hottmann said, and the numbers were large even then.

For example, the average daily traffic volume in 2011 on Wallace Road north of Brush College Road was 12,100 vehicles. By the time a car drove nearly two miles to Wallace south of Glen Creek Road, the count increased to 39,700. The heaviest congestion point, Wallace Road at Second Street just north of the Marion Street Bridge off-ramp, totaled 41,200 vehicles per day on average.

Now, 15 years later, traffic is as busy as ever, and improving the situation is problematic.

“We've looked at plans,” Hottmann said. “The difficulty is providing more capacity. Adding lanes gets difficult because a lot of West Salem is already built out. To widen (the road) is fairly expensive and you're having to buy land and that affects business.”

Here’s another factor. Wallace Road is also Highway 221, a state highway managed by the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). 

“That complicates things a little bit because we have to work with ODOT,” he said. “All of the signals along Wallace Road are ODOT-owned, but the city manages them so that we can integrate those operations with other signals throughout the city.”

Hottmann voiced no complaints about the city/ODOT relationship, but acknowledged that policies sometimes conflict. “Any changes that we do, we have to make sure (ODOT is) okay with it as well.”

So instead of trying to expand the road, he looks for ways to efficiently move vehicles along.

“We're trying to manage what we have a little bit better with a focus on safety, and if we can get capacity out of that, that's good as well,” Hottmann said. “We try to time the signals as best we can but there's only so much traffic that can get through an intersection in an hour.

“It all gets shrunk down into what you can do, for instance, at Wallace and Orchard Heights (roads),” he continued. “We get comments all the time about ‘Hey, can we have more green time on Wallace Road?’ Well, if we do that, we have to take it from someplace and we can't take it from pedestrian time because we have to allow a pedestrian to get across. Then those people (on Orchard Heights) would be like, ‘Hey, now I have to wait longer.’

“It's a balancing act.”

Hottmann also responded to the newspaper reader’s inquiry which asked if rush hour motorists on Orchard Heights could be restrained from turning right on red lights. Those drivers currently clog progress Wallace Road drivers could be making, the reader wrote.

While sympathetic, the traffic engineer doubted a “no turn on red” would help.

“It could be a possible solution, but if I would put up a no right turn on red, it would be for a pedestrian safety issue,” he said. “And I'm not sure how well the compliance would be because people are going to try to go if they're sitting in line. They get a little impatient and they're going to try to make turns like that.”

Hottmann said his office welcomes traffic and safety feedback like this, and invites residents to submit comments on the City of Salem website: www.cityofsalem.net/community/transportation-getting-around/safer-streets

“We take requests for things like speeding and calls for safer streets,” he said. “That's a good place for us to get requests for speed bumps, traffic calming, stop signs, and things like that that are more neighborhood centric.”