The council, which has long admitted to a state of crisis, recently acknowledged that the patient's condition is worsening, with no relief in site. At this month's meeting, council president Fred Kempe said he did not think Issaquah "will ever be able to reach concurrency" because of the city's bottlenecked position between the heavily-populated Sammamish plateau to the north and State Route 18 and 900 to the south, which are packed by commuters looking for north-south alternatives to jammed Interstate 405.

Two years ago, the city identified seven failure points in its roadways. This year, even when taking into account plans for tens of millions of dollars in proposed road projects, the failure rate is up 28%. At the end of the workday, the city's two exits off of Interstate 90 are often backed up nearly a mile with frustrated residents attempting to get home. A trip on Front Street through the small downtown has been known to take close to an hour. A recent update of Issaquah's traffic modeling program identified nine failure points--including three roadways that have yet to break ground.

The planned South Plateau Access Road is already expected to be overrun by 30% more traffic than its intended capacity. A north/south bypass, proposed for just east of Issaquah High School, is also penciling out as less of a solution than hoped. It, too, now appears to be 30% shy of necessary capacity. Modeling indicates it could support only 1,430 cars during peak commute—30 cars less than Front Street, traffic on which the bypass was intended to lighten.

The city's more-than-maxed infrastructure has stymied new development by necessitating the imposition of severe restrictions on the number of car trips per day available for new development. A few years back the council imposed a building moratorium, allowing exemptions for only those projects that would add no more than three evening commute trips. An allotment of 75 p.m. trip exemptions was approved. Of those, 60 have been used thus far for small projects such as single-family residences.

The city is now revisiting its exemption policy. Mark Pywell, Issaquah's city planner tells GlobeSt.com: "There is a proposal before the council to raise the number (of p.m. trips allowed) to five or possibly more."

The proposal will first be reviewed by a council subcommittee early next month. If the change is adopted, the remaining exemptions could be allocated for a total of 19 residential units contained in three multifamily projects that have been waiting in the wings.

However, until meaningful solutions to its traffic problems can be implemented, Issaquah may have seen the last of any significant development for a long while. How long? "Right now that question is impossible to answer," says Pywell.

Instant Insights /

Traffic in Issaquah Builds, Threatening Appeal of Quality of Life

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