The in basket: Do you ever wonder about:
w How the widening of Mile Hill Drive affects the requirement to
stop for a school bus with its red lights flashing?
w The difference between a merge sign and a yield sign?
w Your chances of getting the county to pay for a windshield broken
by a piece of gravel thrown up from the sand spread on the roads
when they are icy?
w Why sheriff’s officers can enforce disabled parking rules in
private parking lots?
Monthly Archives: January 2007
Crosshatch idea gored
The in basket: Glen Adrig, the assistant state coordinator for the AARP Driver Safety Program, said in September, “I noticed today that the gore lines separating lanes at the southbound Highway 304 (Navy Yard Highway) and the Highway 3 merge point have just been repainted for the winter season. ”Why doesn’t the Department of Transportation put at least a few cross hatch lines between the gore lines, to keep the southbound traffic from illegally crossing over the lines before it is safe to make their merge,” he asked.
School buses and center turn lanes
The in basket: Dave Dahlke of Port Orchard asks, ” What is the law pertaining to a school bus with its stop sign out and there is a two-way center turn lane between it and oncoming traffic? Is the oncoming traffic required to stop?
More on parking in cross-hatched areas
The in basket: Pete Bookwalter of Bremerton and Mike, no
last name given, noticed the Dec. 11 Road Warrior column about
parking enforcement by Citizens on Patrol (COPs) , the cadre of
Kitsap County Sheriff’s volunteers who write tickets for violating
handicapped parking regulations, often in private lots.
“Surely our Kitsap County Sheriffs Office doesn’t patrol the
parking lot of the private Wal-Mart,” said Pete. ” Or maybe
that’s some sort of incentive from the city or county to get
Wal-Mart to locate in East Bremerton?
Different speeds advised in the same curve
The in basket: Neil S. e-mails to say, “On Highway 3 just south of North Mason High, there is sharp curve that has a 30 mph sign going south and a 35 mph sign going north. They are both yellow signs, one with a black 35 and one with a black 30. Is this normal or a mistake?”
The in basket: A reader who asks to be known as Invisible in
Poulsbo, writes, “There is a problem that I face daily on our local
roads: traffic lights
won’t change for me! I drive a 4WD Ford pickup which has high
ground
clearance and when I approach a traffic signal it’s like I am
wrapped in an
invisibility cloak.
“Is this a common complaint or just something unique
to me?”
Why ‘yield’ signs, rather than ‘merge’ signs
The in basket: Retired State Sen. Bob Oke was riding with one of the courtesy drivers from an auto dealership, getting a ride while his car was being serviced, and the man asked, as Bob put it, “why the signs at the Port Orchard roundabout say ‘yield’ when ‘merge’ works all over the rest of the country.”
Windshield broken by stone in sand put on road
The in basket: Leslie Varner reacted to the recent Road Warrior
column about ice on Newberry Hill that formed from water leaking
from a Qwest manhole by writing, “maybe the
county and Qwest would like to take care of some of the window
damage that has resulted from the excess gravel that was put down
on Newberry Hill. Window replacement was not in my budget.”
Patrol car on HOV on-ramp
The in basket: Ronda Armstrong of Central Kitsap called to say she was in bumper-to-bumper traffic, working her way down Highway 16 toward the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on the east side one weekday afternoon recently, and saw a car with just one occupant entering on the Jackson Avenue on-ramp that is off limits to single-occupant vehicles that time of day. This car was a Tacoma Police cruiser with just one man in the driver’s seat. He was in civvies but had a uniform on a hanger in back. Was he violating the law, she asked.
More on missing front plates
The in basket: Last summer, I wrote a Road Warrior column
exclaiming on the number of cars I see on the roads without the
legally required front license plate, and relaying a reader’s
similar observation about a lot of them in the Silverdale Whaling
Day’s parade.
I was inundated by e-mails from the antique car collectors telling
me that the cars in the parade were probably collector cars, which
are exempt from the requirement for a front plate. Jurgen Brian,
Hank Rausch, Ron Muhleman, Hugh Lewis, Gary Moen, Terry Dielman,
David Sagdahl, Dick Gallaher, P. Petrinovich and Deanna Goins all
set me straight on that score.
