Steptoe roundabout in Richland to get facelift

The roundabout where Steptoe Street and Columbia Park Trail meet the Highway 240 east offramp has been a sore spot for drivers since it opened eight years ago.

It even has a website dedicated to how to drive it.

“A roundabout with a single lane is totally understandable, everybody knows how to use it,” said Gene Weisskopf of Richland, who started the Surviving the Steptoe Street Roundabout site. “The double-lane is an entirely different situation.”

The state Department of Transportation has responded over time with modified signs and new striping on the pavement.

But now it is going to make changes to the way some drivers enter the traffic circle in Richland near Kennewick’s city limits.

The agency has tried for years to get money for upgrades, but finally got $176,000 for 2015-17 to improve the roundabout, which has averaged about 50 crashes a year, said Jim Mahugh, the transportation department’s regional engineer.

That’s more than the other eight state-owned roundabouts in the region, which covers most of south central Washington.

“We constantly are going through our collision data,” he said. “If you’re coming up high on our collision data, we have to fix that.”

The transportation department plans to reduce the number of entry points to the roundabout from both eastbound and westbound drivers on Columbia Park Trail to one from the current two lanes.

That will hopefully reduce confusion for people entering the roundabout, who don’t always understand that they are supposed to yield to both lanes of traffic driving within the roundabout, Mahugh said.

“That’s one of the primary reasons for collisions,” he said.

High volumes of traffic at the 240 offramp and on Steptoe Street will keep the entrances from there at two lanes, he said.

“If we’d reduced the offramp to one lane, we’d back traffic up (on Highway 240) all the way back to Richland,” he said.

The transportation department will also add chicanes — short curbs that curve to slow drivers — at the entrances to the roundabout.

Chicanes, an artificial feature that creates extra turns in a road, are now used at the double roundabout at highways 240 and 395 in Kennewick, as well as one near Interstate 82 in Union Gap, Mahugh said. Another reason there are so many collisions is drivers are going too fast coming into the roundabout.

Roundabout design has changed since the Steptoe circle was built. Mahugh said it was the first in Washington as part of the state highway system.

“We’ve learned from how we’ve done in the past, and we are improving,” he said.

Weisskopf, who has had issues with the roundabout since it opened, is concerned that the changes won’t make much difference inside the roundabout itself, especially for bicyclists and pedestrians.

“You’re still going to have some kind of a crazy mix inside the circle,” he said. “But the fact that they’re doing anything is great.”

Design on the project could start in July, with construction no earlier than spring 2016. Mahugh said work won’t take long once it starts.

“It’s minor modifications,” he said.

None of the other roundabouts in the transportation department’s south central district are scheduled to be modified, Mahugh said.

Kennewick has been pleased with its 21 roundabouts, the most owned by any city in the state, said city spokeswoman Evelyn Lusignan. The traffic circles have been effective, particularly in reducing injury collisions.

“We don’t have any issues where we’d have to make modifications,” she said.

Pasco has only built one roundabout, at the intersection of North Third and Fourth avenues at Marie Street, while Richland has no official city-built roundabouts. Both cities have discussed building more in the future.

This story was originally published January 3, 2015 at 10:00 PM with the headline "Steptoe roundabout in Richland to get facelift."