Stop and go traffic heads for the Ellsworth Street Bridge in the rain on Tuesday.
With the summer over, afternoon traffic congestion on Highway 20 ahead of Albany’s Ellsworth Street Bridge has made its seasonal comeback. There are ways to make it less annoying, but none of them has yet been taken.
What’s the holdup?
Last year the City of Albany contracted with DKS Associates, a Salem firm of traffic experts, to study the Highway 20 corridor in Albany and make recommendations.
The consultants were paid about a quarter million dollars. The city council got their report last January.
Among the recommendations were to adjust the timing of downtown traffic lights and to create a left-turn lane on Ellsworth Street at Second Avenue.
These seemed like simple measures. You would think that at every meeting of the city council, one or more of the members would ask why nothing has been done.
But no, there is no visible urgency among city officials to try to lessen traffic congestion sooner rather than later.
If you ask, the usual answer is that since 20 is a state highway, any changes have to be approved by ODOT first. And compared to ODOT, even continental drift is fast.
While you’re sitting there in the rain, with your foot on the brake, you wish we had a governor who could make even ODOT move. And maybe you would like Albany to have a city council that, now and then, makes some noise in order to get things done. (hh)
Very artistic photo, Hasso!
All good points, Hasso! At least 9 months of the year many many many people experience this traffic congestion!! A quarter of a million dollars seems like ALOT of money for the City to spend and still no resolution to this situation!!
SSDD
Ya’ll know. Same stuff, different day!
Damn City Council, Damn ODOT.
The Council is too busy trying to find creative new ways to tax us through adding to our utility bills, No time for attending to our actual problems such as simple solutions to traffic snarls.
Traffic congestion aside Hasso,
thats a really nice pic.
make a great Jig Saw puzzle
I thought the same thing!
Having a close friend that works for ODOT, that now fights narcolepsy due to the painfully slow pace of progress doing state work….(Three guys to operate one shovel, after an hour of discussing the proper way to grip the handle), Its not at all surprising that a complex issue is taking so long.
You see this all over town where they are working on streets and sidewalks. One person working while two or more are watching (sorry, supervising).
Shelly Boshart Davis, State Rep for District 15, attended the North Albany Neighborhood Association meeting last night. When asked about convening a meeting of ODOT, Benton County, City of Albany and GAPS (the middle school road in N. Albany creates part of the problem), she stated that she would put together a meeting of these parties – before the election. She is Co-Vice Chair of the Joint Committee on Transportation for the State of Oregon. With her help, I hope we can get solutions to the traffic issues, that are going to be made worse by the middle housing laws that is unleashing unchecked development.
I agree that your picture is great!! Regarding the topic, you can’t get anything done in Albany….they have “shot their wad of money” on Monteith Kiddie Park and the upcoming bricked-over Water Street…if that ever happens. Albany is not the same town it was.
There is no industry to speak of, so you do not have the hard-drinking mill workers filling up the taverns, and there aren’t that many taverns anymore, which is fine. So, with no millworkers, you don’t have their wives downtown at stores spending their husband’s money…in retaliation for the fact that their husbands are drunks!
What made me think of all this is the hours posted on Sweet Red’s door on Second (4 to 10 p.m.) and the new Greyhound Tavern’s door next to it…4 to 10-ish. That is actually how it’s posted…clever, I think. I was on my way to Margin Coffee, which does do a good business, but I think it is the only place downtown that does. In the old days the taverns were open “morning, noon and nighttime, too.”
Obie from Eugene is no doubt taking notice of Albany’s languishing pace of business before they sign on the dotted line to buy 3 parking lots and put up 2 or 3 hotels!!
And the traffic jam at the bridge in downtown Albany is from people passing through or going to Fred Meyer area or residential neighborhoods…not stopping on 1st and 2nd Streets which are the heart of Albany’s downtown.
Coffee, The smoke shops and small gambling bars are replacing many of the taverns. Many of the homeless visit both when they are able to scam or beg a little cash. I guess the city welcomes the meager income and doesn’t mind the harassment of the locals to fund them. If the city can draw people with money to the city, they can supply the beggars with enough money to keep them here so the city will maintain enough homeless to get more funding. The all of us taxpayers and the homeless are just pawns in this power play for money. All of this chaos with traffic, streets in disrepair, unnecessary mass improvements, crime and the homeless crisis is distracting us while our city is being sold to the highest bidder.
Any bidder makes the Council swoon!! And why put up a smoke screen (pun intended) and call the marijuana/pot shops smoke shops? They are “weed,” or marijuana-in-its-various-forms shops!! Yes, I know most every restaurant has a room for online gambling. Oh, and the so-called smoke shops are not the smoke shops from old 30s and 40s movies that sell pipe tobacco.
Time to talk to Senators Merkley and Wyden and transportation secretary Pete Buttegieg about getting another bridge over the river north and east of the curent one so that folks trying to go north don’t have to come through downtown Albany to get there.