Sandpoint's roads need to go back to one-way

We’ve lived in the Sandpoint area for almost 40 years now. During that time there have been lots of changes to our beautiful little town. Some good, some not so good.

Today, we are writing about the change from one-way traffic to two-way traffic. Our question is, is it possible to go back to one-way? Things flowed so much better when it was one-way. It seems that our forefathers knew what they were doing when they decided to change from two-way to one-way a numbers of years back. We’re hoping (and we would bet there are lots of people who would agree with us), that we can reverse this current nightmare and do the same.

When we were one-way, you only had to be concerned with traffic flowing in one direction. Now, it is a constant motion of your head and neck, back and forth looking for coming traffic, pedestrians, bike riders and so on. It makes one dizzy.

The most difficult location is going toward the beach. It is craziness there. Traffic gets backed up in all directions, because the flow is horrible. We can’t tell you how many time we have sat at City Beach Organics and observed a multitude of illegal left turns coming from the beach to get back to the highway. If an undercover policeman were to sit there, we could probably get enough income from tickets to fund all our needs in town.

The other nightmare is Church Street by Columbia Bank. There is only one working lane, so if someone wants to turn left everyone behind them has to wait for oncoming traffic to go through before they can turn and nothing moves behind them. This causes the line to get very long. Many times the line extends back to the post office and beyond. Why weren’t there two lanes put there, so traffic could continue to flow? So those who want to turn right, can. And those who want to go straight, can.

Our guess is that whoever designed this quagmire, was from out-of-town. Hard to believe this came from anyone living here.

Also, there are no signs anywhere telling people how to get back to Highway 95, or to Highway 2 toward Newport. That causes a lot of confusion, as well.

With this confusion and congestion, is it only a matter of time before there is a serious accident somewhere in the city of Sandpoint.

Have you considered writing an article on this? On asking the local residents (not the tourists), what their feelings are about this change? For us, we haven’t talked with one person who lives here, who likes the two-way traffic. In fact, most do their best to avoid Sandpoint altogether now. As we do.

JANET ROSE

GOVINDA MILLER

Priest River