The in basket: Bill Ikaika of Morganmarsh Lane in rural Central Kitsap called me to say he feels endangered whenever he’s driving away from his home and comes to the stop sign on One Mile Road at Peter Hagen Road. He can’t see more than a couple dozen feet to his right because of a brushy promontory that blocks his view.
I drove out their to check it out, knowing that in 50 years of reporting in this county, I don’t recall ever being on either One Mile or Peter Hagen roads. While I was there, I made it a point to drive on nearby Lost Highway, an ominously named road I’d heard of for decades but also had never driven on.
The out basket: l could see Bill’s point about the lack of visibility, but I’m not sure how much peril there is. I drove the final dead-end mile of Peter Hagen that begins at One Mile Road, and met not a single car going either way about 3:30 p.m. on a weekday.
But I told the county it should be a simple thing to fix, as the dead-end sign and a speed limit sign are on a post smack in the middle of the promontory, so it must be in the road right of way and subject to modification
If nothing else, it would be a good place for a warning side on Peter Hagen. Cars coming out of the dead-end don’t have any better view of the intersection than cars at the stop sign have to their right.
Doug Bear of county public works says he has forwarded the matter as a service request to the road maintenance folks for their consideration.
As for Lost Highway, I didn’t go more than a couple hundred yards on it, for fear my Mazda 3 would be shaken apart by the pot holes. It’s not so lost, though, that people haven’t built homes on it. It fact, I saw a few homes and met two cars in that 200 yards, unlike my experience on Peter Hagen’s dead end.
I asked Doug what the letter U on the Lost Highway road sign means, and what its status is with the county.
‘U’ means an “unmaintained county right-of-way,” he said. “These are areas where the county has been granted the right-of-way under the road but the road has never been developed to county road standards. Maintenance for these types of the roads belongs to the homeowners alongside it.”
The more common designation ‘Pvt” on roads the county doesn’t maintain means the county doesn’t even own the right of way under them, he said.
