The View From Here

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mum was pretty awesome. Like most kids whose parents actually take an active interest in their lives, I thought she was mostly just pretty lame, and only came to all my rugby and cricket matches, and BMX meets and tennis tournaments and athletic and swimming meets because she didn’t have anything better to do. Apart from raise a kid by herself and hold down a career.
One of my clearest memories is every Saturday morning she would drive around half the city in our yellow Ford Econovan, picking up a bunch of my teammates on our way to footy, or whatever was the sport of the season.
There would always be five or six of us in the Econovan. I never thought much about why I never saw their parents – my mates were usually standing out  in the front yard by themselves, boots in hand, waiting for us to swing by.
But as mum was the chauffeur, she would then usually become the nurse, water runner and nose wiper too.
As the Sammamish City Council begins to consider options for the future of Beaver Lake Park, I have been thinking of these Saturday’s of my youth. One of the biggest concerns with plans for the park center around parking – will there be enough to accommodate visitors, particularly the junior sports teams that will come to use the playing fields?
Ideas such as staggering game times to avoid crossovers, creating parking along 244th or at the intersection of that road and Southeast 24th, have all been floated as temporary solutions to what is looming as a big, permanent problem.
People in Sammamish and Issaquah are starting to get really mad about traffic in their cities, and I am constantly hearing why we should expand this road or that, add a right of way here and a turn lane there, to solve the blockages on 228th and many other spots.
Talking with Kamuron Gurol last week, the Director of Community Development at the City of Sammamish admitted that traffic, roads and parking are the biggest problems facing the city. And they are not likely to go away.
I had an appointment with Kamuron up at city hall at about 1 p.m. I pulled out of our office on Gilman Boulevard, and straight into a near traffic jam – the lunch hour rush.
Lunch hour rush? Why on earth would traffic increase so dramatically around lunch hour? It doesn’t make sense.
It’s people choosing not to walk to a restaurant, or bring their own food to work, but drive a few blocks to a drive-thru or some other place. In America, one out of every three meals is eaten in a car.
It’s behavioral. Bad roads aren’t causing the traffic, bad lifestyles are.
Earlier this year I wrote a story about a group of senior students at Issaquah High School who developed a carpooling program to cope with the loss of parking spaces at the school during construction. Researching the program, they looked around for other high schools in the country who had gotten into carpooling. Guess how many they found? Nationwide? Zero.
Wonder why 228th looks like it does at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.? One parent dropping off one student (usually in a machine that is at least three times bigger that it needs to be). Or one student driving themselves. I know there are plenty of exceptions to this, but there are still more than enough propelling the single occupancy disaster to make it the single biggest human characteristic defining our landscape.
And I am sure that should a rotating carpool system make its way into the everyday parlance of junior sporting teams and their parents, it would go a long way to solving the issue of parking near the fields at Beaver Lake Park.
As Kamuron told me, the city recognizes that more than half of the battle is behavioral and must soon act upon it, encouraging work and lifestyle routines that keep people off the roads during peak hours.
Reducing congestion in this manner doesn’t necessarily involve cramming into a standing-room only bus, van-pooling, or slogging across the I-90 bridge like Lance Armstrong.
Sammamish and Issaquah have a high percentage of top level executives and managers, people in creative jobs, IT programmers and designers – people who can bring a little more flexibility into their work day by going in later and coming home later, or vice versa.
There is also an enormous opportunity for the city and local businesses to encourage telecommuting, common areas for online meetings, shared resource hubs. Some Eastside businesses give free bus passes to their employees, but also gym memberships to encourage them to do something else after work before driving home at 5:30 p.m. and joining the gridlock.
What is miraculous about these lifestyle decisions to help us all stay out of traffic jams, they make great “life.” Like six kids in the back of a yellow Econovan, reaching out to our neighbors, teammates, schoolmates and colleagues is about more than traffic sense; it’s about community.