PORT ANGELES — A nearly 2-mile portion of the Olympic Discovery Trail that links central Port Angeles with the heavily residential west side is being redesigned so that pedestrians, bicyclists and residents with disabilities can more easily wend their way along the route.
The Port Angeles City Council last week unanimously approved a $229,000 contract with Zenovic & Associates of Port Angeles that begins the process of renovating Port Angeles’ final piece of urban trail along the ODT’s eventual 126-mile route from Port Townsend to La Push.
Zenovic & Associates owner Steve Zenovic said Monday that by spring 2018 he will redesign the existing trail’s hodge-podge of road shoulders and sidewalks of varying widths that now lead along Marine Drive west from the Valley Creek Estuary and up torturous Hill Street to the 10th Street Trailhead.
It will include installing 12-foot shared bicycler-pedestrian paths from Valley Creek past the old K-Ply site and Platypus Marine to the existing 12-foot-wide shared path along the Port of Port Angeles’ East Boat Haven and 4,200 feet of shared trail from Crown Park to 10th and Milwaukee streets.
But the major portion of work — and project cost — will be generated by eliminating a three-tenths-of-a-mile portion of bicycle-only trail on Hill Street from Marine Drive to Hill Street’s intersection with Fourth Street.
It will be replaced with a nearby stand-alone bicycle-pedestrian trail to be built partly on existing railroad grade north of Hill Street across the face of the steep, alder-choked bluff that also holds Hill Street.
“That big alder slope is going to end up having a trail road right through it 12 feet wide,” Zenovic said.
The Hill Street portion of the trail — a road shoulder that forces cyclists to labor steeply uphill against the traffic — is neither bicycle- nor pedestrian-friendly, said Gordon Taylor, a board member of the Peninsula Trails Coalition.
The Coalition, a nonprofit group that promotes establishing and maintaining the trail, has been working with city staff on the project.
“It’s very important from the standpoint of the Trails Coalition because it completes the link through Port Angeles,” Taylor said Monday.
“This will give us a bypass on Hill Street. We’ve been poking at this for a long time.”
Zenovic said the trail that will replace the Hill Street segment will be sloped at a 4 percent to 5 percent grade, a little steeper than Lincoln Street, and will be Americans with Disabilities Act compliant.
“There’s no good, effective way for bicyclists and trail walkers, for lack of a better term, to get from the east side of Port Angeles to the west side of Port Angeles and stay near the waterfront,” Zenovic said.
“It’s important to take them off Hill Street. There may be small bridges, but the intent is for it to be basically straight. That’s the important thing, that it creates a link from east to west where people in wheelchairs can use it as well as pedestrians.”
The trail from the Valley Creek Estuary west is on roadway shared regularly by trucks.
“It’s important to create safe spaces for bicyclists and pedestrians in that zone,” he said.
The $229,000 contract that City Council members awarded Zenovic on Feb. 7 consists of a $200,000 state Department of Transportation Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Grant and $29,000 in city real estate excise tax funds.
Bruce Dees & Associates LLC of Tacoma also submitted a request for proposal, scoring lower than Zenovic in experience, qualifications, use of local professionals, staff availability and understanding of the project.
Zenovic said Monday that the design will be completed by spring 2018.
Stakeholder meetings will be held with the Port of Port Angeles, the state Department of Transportation, and user groups along the trail such as the forest industry companies Merrill & Ring Inc. and Green Crow Corp.
There are some private property owners the city will have to negotiate with to make the improvements, but most property is on existing right-of-way and publicly owned right-of-way.
Part of Zenovic’s job will be coming up with a time line for project completion and a cost, an estimate that he would not venture a guess on Monday.
But it will be at least $1 million, Zenovic suggested.
“It will certainly have six zeroes behind the first number,” he said.
Taylor predicted it will be a challenge to engineer the trail in an area where bluffs are slide-prone.
“Anything that hits on that hillside rolls to the bottom,” Taylor said.
________
Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55650, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
