Roads meeting is tonight

BIG LAKE — The borough is planning improvements to two major intersections in this lakeside community and is staging a meeting today to talk about it.

The intersections in question are both on Big Lake Road, first at North Shore Drive and then at Hollywood Road.

Mike Campfield, a Mat-Su Borough Engineer serving as project manager for the intersection improvements, said that the North Shore Drive project is likely to get built but the Hollywood Road project is just a plan for possible future improvements. He said the $2 million in borough bond money available isn’t enough to do complete projects.

“It’s more driven by community concerns rather than traffic and safety concerns that (the state Department of Transportation) has,” Campfield said. “The community council passed a resolution saying that their priority is on the North Shore Drive intersection.”

Campfield said the community’s concerns were about foot traffic — there actually is significant pedestrian traffic walking to the post office and to the gas station — and with slowing down traffic there.

“There is actually some foot traffic out there and they’re just kind of criss-crossing wherever and it’s kind of a sharp turn and people kind of take it fast sometimes,” Campfield said.

Plans for the intersections are still preliminary but the borough has in mind putting a roundabout at North Shore Drive.

“DOT in the late ’90s looked at a roundabout at this intersection,” Campfield said.

He said he’s not sure why those plans were shelved but he thinks there were concerns about the feasibility of it and about putting the state’s first roundabout in a rural area like Big Lake as opposed to the big city of Anchorage where more people might get used to using them. The first traffic circle eventually went in on Dowling Road.

The plan for the intersection improvement project — part of a raft of borough bonds that has been responsible for something of a road construction boom in Mat-Su — was to fix both intersections. The project’s share of those bonds is $2 million.

“It’s $2 million total and it’s just the roundabout on North Shore Drive is going to take all $2 million between the design and the construction and the right-of-way acquisition and the utility relocation,” Campfield said.

The community council singled out North Shore as the priority, he said, because it gets more traffic and because it is at the entrance to what the area’s plans designate as Big Lake’s downtown center.

The goal is to eventually calm traffic through the area to make it more like traffic patterns in other cities — Wasilla and Palmer are both 35 mph on all but the biggest roads.

“All of Big Lake is posted at 45 mph so I think the community council folks would like to see it drop to, I don’t know what, but maybe 35 or something like that,” Campfield said.

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