The in basket: Dorothy Cokelet of Sunnyhill Road in the West Hills area just outside the Bremerton city limits wonders why the county didn’t restore the yellow centerline on her road after paving it this summer. 

There’s a lot of traffic on the road, she said. 

The out basket: And so the county discovered after another resident protested the same thing, says Traffic Engineer Jeff Shea.

Sunnyhill will get its stripe back, but not right away.

The county had decided to no longer put a center stripe on Sunnyhill as it standardized which roads get a center stripe and which don’t, he said.

“We now evaluate all roads when overlayed or chip–sealed for striping requirements,” he said. “The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices only mandates striping on paved urban arterials and collectors with daily traffic greater than 6,000 vehicles per day.

Sunnyhill, with about 600 vehicles a day, was among 15 roads chosen to be added to the list of those without a center stripe, he said. 

“At the request of a resident living along the road, we conducted an investigation of the street,” Jeff said. We found many non-residents use it as a cut-through to get between Harlow and Werner.  The officially classified collector which runs parallel to Sunnyhill (Broad, O and Ida roads) does not really work as a collector due to the narrowness of the road and the turns involved in getting from Harlow to Werner.” Also, they noted that the truck volumes on Sunnyhill were much higher than most roads, 10-15 percent.

 “For these reasons we made the decision to restripe the road,” he said. “The problem we’ve encountered since making this decision is the weather. 

“We cannot stripe with our environmentally friendly water-based paint if there is even a hint of rain,” Jeff said. “It will not dry. The air and surface temperature must be above 50 degrees or warmer also.  We are hoping we get a chance to stripe it this year, though the window of opportunity may be very limited.”

The in basket: Sarann Walker and Cliff Kincaid are concerned about a couple of places inside the city of Port Orchard where the lane striping has worn off and drivers have to guess where they should be relative to other traffic.

Sarann lives near Marcus Whitman Junior High and is worried about the lack of striping on Mile Hill Drive at the city limits around Harrison Street.

“It’s a real mess trying to make a left turn onto Harrison or in the opposite direction,” she said. “The stripes are all worn away. l don’t feel really comfortable there.”

Cliff sees the same problem at the intersection of Sedgwick and Sidney roads at the town’s southern city limits.  

“If you are headed east at the new intersection,” he said, “the yellow line for the left turn lane heading west has been obliterated. I’ve almost had a head-on there, though I am a pretty cautious driver.”

The out basket: Mark Dorsey, public works director for Port Orchard, says he is getting anxious waiting for Kitsap County, with which the city contracts for the annual restriping of its streets, to get the job done. The contract has been signed for a couple of months, he said, and bad weather is coming. 

He expects the county’s work to include both the areas Sarann and Cliff describe, even though the Mile Hill spot is where the city and state are at odds over which should be maintaining it. The city this summer filled in the delaminations that were creating a rough roadway there and will pay for the striping while the jurisdictional issue is hashed out, he said.

The state plans to ask the Legislature for permission to turn Highway 166 from the Sidney Avenue intersection downtown to the eastern city limit near Harrison over to the city. Mark says the city doesn’t plan to “just roll over and let them,” and is working with state Sen. Derek Kilmer on a strategy for opposing the plan.

The striping of city streets also will include Tremont Street from the city limit to the Highway 16 freeway. Mark said the city’s contract with the county doesn’t call for the added expense of recessing the reflective lane markers there, as the county was able to do for the first time from the city limits east this spring.

The in basket: Tom Wetterlind in June said “If you are on Tremont Street (in Port Orchard) and go over the overpass and start up the hill on the other side, there are cuts made in the road when they repaired it. There is a ton of them, In evening in the rain, they all look like centerlines. When you get up to the top when it becomes Lund (Avenue), the slashes all run parallel to the road.”

The out basket: This was an issue last winter and spring after heavy sanding and plowing during the winter snow siege took off most of the lane reflectors and stripes. The sealant that creates the reflections to which Tom objects increased the uncertainty about where the edges of the lanes were.

Since then Kitsap County has restriped its portion of that street (completion of the portion inside Port Orchard’s city limits is pending) and used a newly acquired grinding machine to create recesses into which the lane reflectors have been put so that snow plows blades skim over them and don’t pop them off. 

That’s all the county plans to do there to delineate the lanes, says Doug Bear of the county public works staff, so those who still are confused by the shine off the sealant will have to use the lane stripes and recessed reflectors to be sure they aren’t straddling lanes.

The in basket: Jeff Denton asks “Why is the county not repainting all of the yellow striping on county roads?  I have seen them painting the white striping on most roads, but not the yellow striping.”

He cited Clear Creek and Newberry Hill roads and Seabeck Highway as examples. “Previously, I have watched them paint the stripes together at the same time,” he said. “I thought that they might be trying to save some money on not painting the center line this year.”

I, too, though they normally did both colors at the same time on whatever road they were striping, and noticed the same thing Jeff mentions on Tracyton Boulevard, Central Valley and Pine roads.

The out basket: Despite our impression of how it is normally done, says Jeff Shea, county traffic engineer, doing different colors at different times is the county’s procedure,

“We stripe the white and yellow separately,” he said. There are exceptions to this methodology, but in general we try to do all the white first and then do the yellow.  The truck configuration and support vehicles change to do the different colors, so we’ve found the most efficient method is to do one color at a time.

The county says it repaints every stripe on its roads every year.