The in basket: George, who didn’t include a last name, asked in
an e-mail, “There are three new LED street light just south of the
intersection at Mountain View Road and Silverdale Way.
“Just wondering if you know why they are now there,” he wrote.
The out basket: They are part of Kitsap County’s ongoing program of making perilous locations safer, much like the new guardrails we discussed last time.
Jeff Shea, Kitsap County traffic engineer, said, “This Silverdale Way location is covered by our federal safety grant projects.
“Several motorists have left the roadway at this location. Two of the collisions involved fatalities. One was a motorcyclist going too fast, and the other a motorist speeding under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
A guardrail was installed to protect motorists from going over the embankment. When we look at the accident records if a number of the collisions occur at night, and we feel the darkness may have contributed to the collisions, lighting up the roadway is an option that we consider. In this case, we opted to have the street lights installed.”
The lights actually make it harder to gauge how far away traffic is from turning left from Mountain View Rd onto Silverday Way because you cannot see the oncoming vehicle’s headlights as you could when the blind corner was pitch black.