Pedestrian safety and traffic congestion are two of the factors being looked at in the Tualatin Valley Highway study.
This post has been updated. See below for details.
When is a street more than a street?
That's the question Metro councilors took up Tuesday, as planners from Metro and Hillsboro think about the future of the Tualatin Valley Highway.
The heaviest-travelled section of the road, from Hillsboro to Beaverton, has been the focus of several planning efforts recently, including Washington County's Aloha-Reedville study and the Tualatin Valley Highway Corridor Refinement Plan. The latter was the subject of part of Tuesday's Metro Council work session.
Unlike other corridor planning projects, like the East Metro Connections Study, for example, the Tualatin Valley Highway plan is locally driven, with Metro a participant, not a leader, in the process. Washington County, the Oregon Department of Transportation, Hillsboro and Beaverton are at the fore of the planning project for the highway, which is officially Oregon State Route 8.
The westside's study of the TV Highway is at a key decision point: Should the road be thought of as a throughway, which helps facilitate traffic through a particular area, or an arterial, which is designed more towards helping traffic get around within a particular area?
As many Tualatin Valley residents know, the answer is not so simple.
Studies of traffic on the road showed that only about 8 percent of the cars on the Tualatin Valley Highway are passing through, starting somewhere west of downtown Hillsboro and ending somewhere east of Cedar Hills Boulevard in Beaverton. Seventy percent of the monitored trips began or ended in the project's study area. The amount of traffic and the road's speed limits tend to indicate the Tualatin Valley Highway should be thought of as an arterial.
Traffic volumes on the highway have been relatively stable since the 1980s, planners said. Part of that is because of transit – the 57 Tualatin Valley Highway bus line has frequent service, and MAX parallels the highway to the north. In 2010, the highway was designated as a second-tier priority for future high capacity transit service.
The road has become more congested in the past decades, but that's because of more traffic lights and businesses on the highway's frontage, not because of more cars using it. That's part of the reason that traffic data won't be the only factor in deciding whether the Tualatin Valley Highway should be planned out as an arterial or a throughway.
"One of the best ideas that has come out of Metro in the last 20 years is the street design concept which says you should look at the adjacent land use to determine street design," said Councilor Rex Burkholder. He pushed for a more nuanced view of the corridor's conditions, instead of the either-or option before the council.
But most of the councilors at Tuesday's work session said they felt that the Tualatin Valley Highway does function more as an arterial.
Kathryn Harrington, the area's Metro Council representative and the council's liaison to the study, said in an interview Thursday that the more comprehensive approach to corridor planning – looking at communities, not just highways, when planning transportation improvements – was reflected in the comments that the people submitted in the plan's comment phase.
"They want multiple solutions," she said. The road's configuration "doesn't address all of our needs to a satisfactory level. We need to make improvements so that people have an easier time taking transit, walking, bicycling and driving."
The corridor study is expected to continue until mid-2012, when broad recommendations for the Tualatin Valley Highway are expected to be introduced.
Note – An earlier version of this story did not list all of the TV Highway project partners. The Oregon Department of Transportation is also a project partner. This version has been corrected. (Jan. 9, 2012)