City of Marysville implements measures aimed at reducing highway traffic on residential streets
MARYSVILLE -- A Caltrans project to widen Highway 70 could add to the already crazy Marysville traffic and residents are growing increasingly annoyed, calling their local roads a makeshift highway.
The city is implementing calming traffic measures to ease up congestion, especially along those residential streets.
"Maybe 50 residents live on a street but we're getting at least five times that number. Our numbers are saying it's not really the residents who live here who are using the streets but people that are cutting through," said the city of Marysville Director of Public Works Vincenzo Corazza.
During peak hours, the city of Marysville can see 900 cars per hour. Most of them are coming off one of the four highways that feed into the city and taking a shortcut through the residential neighborhoods. Neighbors say they aren't slowing down or taking into account that people live there.
"It's not their problem. It's a good thing for them, it saves them time but it's not good for this neighborhood," said Marysville resident Tom Galven.
Galven and his wife have lived on D Street for nearly a decade. Their dog was killed by a speeding shortcutter and they worry about the daycare and schools in the area.
"Sometimes the kids are kind of running out unseen and that's just as long as it took Charlie to get hit by a car," he said.
Some of the traffic measures include roundabouts, signage, and delineators. At 14th and E, they're retiming traffic signals to push more people to go left down non-residential streets.
"We need to divert the traffic back on the highway. But if they do sneak through, we want to calm them down we don't want them to go really fast," said Corazza.
"I see it every day I live across the street from the elementary school a lot of children walking through our streets. A lot of the drivers tend to go faster. There's a real risk of them coming in contact with the vehicles," said another Marysville resident during the public comment portion of Tuesday's city council meeting.
The delineators have been up for three weeks. Galven said they've already made a tremendous difference on his street.
"We're feeling the peace and quiet that this has created. We're not getting the noise, we're not getting the traffic, we're not getting the trucks. We're delighted," said Galvan.
For now, these traffic measures are just temporary but the city says if things go well, they could become permanent.