Once completed, the Town of Pagosa Springs can use the Multimodal Plan to incrementally guide future investment, and to pursue grant funding opportunities from state and federal sources. Although additional study, design, and coordination will be needed to implement improvements, this plan represents the first step developing a more connected, safe, and multimodal East End…
— from the 2022 ‘Pagosa Springs East End Multimodal Transportation Plan’
Back in 2014, the Archuleta County Commissioners ran an interesting set of questions on the November ballot. These were ‘advisory’ measures, without any legal ramifications, just to get a sense of how the community was feeling about ‘recreation’ as we recovered slowly from the Great Recession.
Advisory 1A asked if we were in favor of forming a ‘Town & County Park & Recreation District’ — a special district, funded by local taxes and state grants, to oversee our community’s parks, trails, open spaces, and recreation offerings. Advisory 2A, on the same ballot, asked if we favored a permanent 1% sales tax to fund this proposed special district, and Advisory 3A asked if we might approve of a ‘limited time sales tax’ to complete certain parks and recreation projects.
Advisory 1A — showing general approval of a future ‘Parks & Recreation District’ — won by a sizable margin, with a 65% ‘Yes’ vote.
Advisory 2A and Advisory 3A — asking if we wanted to actually pay for parks and recreation — both lost by a sizable margin, with 60% voting ‘No.’
People often react differently — even on the very same election ballot — when you ask them if they want something, and when you ask them if they want to pay for that same thing.
I bring up this concept because the Town of Pagosa Springs and its new ‘East End Multimodal Transportation Plan’ consultants, Alta Planning & Design, spent the past year writing a $180,000 plan for the future of the East End commercial district. As part of the plan process, they held three in-person ‘public input’ events and one virtual ‘public input’ event, involving a total of about 90 citizens.
From what I can tell from reading through the 90-page Plan Appendix, at no point in the year-long process did they offer the public any estimate of what this plan, or any of the plan elements, might cost.
Call em crazy, but I like to know the price before I buy it.
When we left our discussion of the Plan yesterday in Part Three, we had heard briefly about the benefits and challenges of traffic roundabouts, because three such features were shown in the Plan, installed within, or near, the East End commercial district. This sparked my interest in traffic roundabouts.
The two roundabouts proposed for the East End commercial district, per se — (not including the third roundabout proposed for the Highway 160/84 intersection) — are based on the premise that each of the two frontage roads would be ‘one way’, with the south frontage road being ‘one way going east’ and the north frontage road being ‘one way going west.’
One of the purported benefits of traffic roundabouts — where appropriate — is better traffic flow, and another is fewer traffic accidents. But roundabouts are not appropriate at every intersection.
Then we have the a cost.
Four questions that were not asked, or answered, in the ‘Plan’ were: “What does a roundabout cost?”… “How sufficient is the current traffic flow, without any roundabouts?”… “How dangerous is the existing road layout?”… and “Would roundabouts be appropriate at these locations?”
One of the companies that gave input into the 179-page Multimodal Plan was Durango-based SGM Engineering. But I was not able to find any comments about whether roundabouts in the East End, specifically, would actually be appropriate, helpful, or safe.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, March 2021:
Roundabouts are not inexpensive — a single-lane roundabout costs roughly $1.2 to $1.8 million to construct while multilane roundabouts can cost more than $2 million each, according to estimates from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. But they can provide substantial cost savings in other ways. Cities or counties no longer have to pay for the annual maintenance, electricity, and supplies for traffic lights at intersections that use roundabouts. And if a storm knocks out power, the roundabout keeps functioning; the city or county no longer needs to deploy police officers to direct traffic through intersections with dead traffic lights.
Obviously, the engineers are talking, here, about intersections potentially dangerous enough to require traffic lights. Dangerous enough to deploy police officers.
The ingress and egress driveways in the East End commercial district hardly qualify for traffic signals, in my humble opinion.
Why would they then qualify for $1.2 to $1.8 million roundabouts? To provide a nice taxpayer-funded profit for the engineering firm designing them, and for the construction company building them?
When the Town asked the public to ‘vote’ on upgrades to the East End, only nine people voted in favor of roundabouts in the East End commercial district, compared with, for instance, 39 favorable votes for “Pedestrian Bridge”, and 36 votes for “Fill In the West Pond for Additional Park Space”.
As mentioned, none of the proposed ‘upgrades’ on which people were voting, included estimated dollar amounts.
I spent some time on Wednesday observing the vehicle and pedestrian traffic at the East End. I timed my visit for around 4:30pm, when the flood of happy holiday skiers were coming back from Wolf Creek Ski Area. But I didn’t, in fact, observe a flood. It seemed like normal daily traffic.
I observed numerous people walking across the First Street Bridge using the existing four-foot-wide sidewalk that is supposedly dangerous and frightening. I counted the number of seconds a vehicle typically waited before making a left turn into the River Center parking lot; the longest wait was 30 seconds. I observed large trucks traveling east and west at 45 MPH, and wondered what diameter a roundabout would be, that could accommodate that type of vehicle.
Another observation. None of the vehicles leaving via the River Center exit attempted to make a left turn. Which makes perfect sense. We’re talking, after all, about the ‘East End’. 99% of Pagosa’s businesses, and probably 95% of our tourist lodging, and probably 95% of our full-time population are located to the west of the East End.
Why would a vehicle make a left turn at the River Center exit? They wouldn’t. They would use the Conoco exit at the other end of the frontage road — where, incidentally, I was easily able to make a right turn and head west.
Is the ‘Pagosa Springs East End Multimodal Transportation Plan’ proposing $3 million to $4 million worth of future roundabouts that are completely unnecessary, and perhaps inappropriate?