Couplet concerns raised at meeting

PALMER — As the project to deal with traffic coming into and out of Palmer progresses, the project’s manager put forth a plea for civility.

“It doesn’t do any good to come to the public meeting mad at me before you’ve ever met me,” said Jim Amundsen with the state’s Department of Transportation and Public Facilities. “I would ask you that you give me the courtesy and the opportunity over the next couple of months to be able to convince you.”

The project, which most refer to as the Palmer Couplet, would have traffic moving into the city split from traffic moving out. Traffic coming in would follow the current route on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway, which morphs into Evergreen Avenue once it crosses the Glenn Highway. The route going out would be an extension of the current Dogwood Avenue that ends behind Carrs.

The couplet has raised a number of concerns in the community. Tuesday, Amundsen spoke at a meeting called to discuss a number of downtown projects, but the couplet quickly took center stage.

Questions asked of him were wide ranging. Sue Welton with the Palmer Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored the meeting, told Amundsen she felt the issue most on everyone’s mind was whether the couplet idea was set in stone.

“If it is not going to be a one-way couplet then the money goes back to the Legislature,” Amundsen said, and the process starts all over. Selecting a couplet concept was a process begun in 2007. Abandoning the couplet would put everything back to square one.

Another question asked: Could Amundsen tell the audience how to stop the project all together?

“No sir. I will not. That’s not my job,” Amundsen said.

Someone else raised the issue that has been bandied about in Palmer regarding other communities — Fairbanks in particular — that were working to change one-way streets back to two-way streets.

Amundsen said that wasn’t entirely accurate. Fairbanks and other places that had replaced one-way streets with two-way were mostly, he said, abandoning a one-way downtown grid in favor of a system more akin to the couplet. The way a couplet works, he said, is to create a traffic loop for people to follow. Once they’re in downtown they’ll use smaller, two-way streets. Then they’ll get on the bigger one-way street to leave.

A good analogy, he said, would be downtown Anchorage, where inbound traffic uses 5th Avenue and outbound traffic uses 6th. The rest of the grid, he pointed out, is by-and-large made up of two-way streets.

An example of going the other way, keeping the one-way streets in place, he said, would be Muldoon.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I know it’s the right answer,” Amundsen said.

That said, the city can have a big impact on what exactly that looks like. Do they want traffic lights at every intersection slowing traffic or would they prefer cobblestones and other traffic calming measures?

Amundsen said he’d be back this summer or fall for a full-blown public hearing.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.