Changes for SR3

Summer 2024 construction will impede traffic

Matt Baide | Apr 21, 20220

Courtesy of WSDOT count

The intersections of state Route 3 at East Agate Road and East Pickering Road, shown on the map, will have roundabouts constructed in 2024.

Two new roundabouts are coming to state Route 3 in the Shelton area in 2024.

The roundabouts are planned for the intersections of state Route 3 and East Agate Road and East Pickering Road. They're part of the state Department of Transportation' Target Zero Strategic Highway Safety Plan, which has a goal to reduce the number of traffic deaths and serious injuries on state roads to zero by 2030.

WSDOT planner Dennis Engel said the agency has a program to assess safety matters on smaller state highways. The regional traffic office that includes Mason County has several criteria for judging the need for safety improvments, including the number of angle crashes, crashes that exceed the average for similar locations and having enough pavement to put in a compact roundabout. The criteria also includes having fewer than 25,000 vehicles on average for annual daily traffic. In this region, 11 compact roundabouts were identified and money was available for most of those projects to move into the pre-design phase.

East Agate Road is not on level ground but Pickering Road is, and Engel said both projects should be able to be built with the existing asphalt.

"That's the idea with these is that we use the limits that we already have out there," Engel said. "We're basically going in and using that same pavement."

WSDOT states roundabouts are safer than traditional traffic signals or stop-controlled intersections and accommodate vehicles of all sizes.

The projects are in the design phase, with plans for construction in 2024. The Highway Safety Improvement Program will provide money for the roundabouts, estimated to cost between $1.5 and $2 million per location.

Mason County residents had the opportunity to look at the plans and comment during an online open house from March 23 to April 6.

Engel said WSDOT received some comments stating these are not the right places for roundabouts and some suggested other locations.

"We had some folks who were concerned about bicycles," Engel said. "That's usually one that comes up is how do bicycles get through. But for the most part, people seem to be in favor of it. We had a stakeholder meeting with local jurisdictions and the ones who are really in favor of it are school transportation folks and Mason Transit because both locations, they have a hard time getting their buses out and so this is going to help them out quite a bit."

Engel said there weren't a lot of responses and he wished there was more feedback on the projects. He said WSDOT has completed pre-design and it will go to program management where they will "program the dollars."

After that, it will go to WSDOT's designers to work on before going out to bid and construction in 2024.

The roundabouts are scheduled to be constructed around the same time as the state Route 3 freight corridor, and Engel said Mason County Commissioner Kevin Shutty brought this up at a stakeholders meeting. Engel said the same design team is working on both projects and they will discuss coordinating the two projects to avoid major traffic disruptions.

There was also concern about no detour routes to divert traffic during construction.

"When we build these sort of things, we build it half at a time. We work it so the traffic can get through," Engel said. "If it's going to be where they have to close it off, they might have to do work at night. We do not want to impact traffic if there's not a feasible detour around it."

Engel did acknowledge that while they don't want to impact traffic, the construction of the roundabout will disrupt the flow of traffic but said construction time should be the summer at most.

"There's no way around it, but we may have during the day, off peak times, where we have one lane road out there with flaggers or something like that," Engel said. "The designs of these shouldn't be that big where it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of work."

The amount of traffic at those intersections only warranted a single-lane roundabout, according to Engel.

For more information about the project, go to tinyurl.com/ycxkvsb6.