Road Warrior

The in basket:  Carl Erickson writes, “Now that the Highway 304 project from Highway 3 to the shipyard gate is done, I’m curious about what’s going to be planted in the median.
“It seems to me that deciduous trees, as are in the older section, are a dangerous, labor-intensive way to beautify the area with leaves falling and maintenance crews dodging vehicles to clean them up.

“And if the crews block off the roadway during clean up, it causes traffic congestion.
“How do the planners justify that type of tree planting, or maybe they won’t this time,” he asked.
The out basket: Lynn Price with the city of Bremerton engineering staff replied, “The landscaping for this section of the SR304 Gateway project was designed by landscape architects from WSDOT. A totally different type of trees and plants will be used on this section.   
“The designers looked to provide a natural-looking landscape that would require minimal maintenance.  Small growing trees were selected specifically to minimize any potential safety hazard. 
“The majority of the plant material will be native small growing shrubs and ground cover that are well-suited for the harsh roadside conditions in this area.  There will be no formal lawn areas or irrigation in this section of the project.
“There will be a mixture of small trees such as Amur maple, Canadian Serviceberry, Tschonoskii crabapple and American mountain ash.  The shrubs and ground cover will be a mixture of  Oregon grape holly, Grow-Low sumac and Chenault coralberry. 
“They should not require lane closures for leaf cleanup but lane closures for weed control will occur once to twice a year,” Lynn said. 

Tags: Highway 304, median

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 1:34 pm by sitedude and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.