Lynnwood staff detail advanced traffic system and urge funding for signals, calming and sidewalks

City traffic and street operations staff briefed the Lynnwood City Council on April 20 about signal operations, maintenance priorities and funding pressures, underscoring public-safety and liability consequences from deferred work.

Signal operations and resilience: Mike Thomas, signal operations supervisor, described the traffic network as a coordinated, safety-critical system rather than "just red, yellow, and green lights." He gave an inventory and operational summary: "We have 69 traffic signals, 41 school beacons, 10 radar feedback signs, 800 street lights, 32 lighted crosswalks, and 48 miles of fiber optic cable" and explained adaptive corridor timing that recalculates timing roughly every 15 seconds. Thomas also recounted a contractor-cut fiber outage on 60th that took about nine hours to locate and repair and showed a video of an April 5 power-pole incident in which battery backups kept a signal operating for more than eight hours: "The signal ran on its batteries the whole time," he said, noting that those backups prevent callouts and traffic disruption.

Traffic engineering and service demand: Maisha Mahmoud, Lynnwood's traffic engineer, outlined the scope of the position and daily workload: signal timing, crosswalk and ADA reviews, traffic impact analyses for private development, and roughly 3 ollars'-5 resident requests per day. She said neighborhood speeding and requests for no-parking signs and marked crosswalks are the top recurring demands and explained that pedestrian and bicycle counts are more labor-intensive to collect than vehicle counts.

Traffic calming and costs: Staff walked councilmembers through a traffic-calming toolbox and cost estimates: mobile radar signs ($3,000 ollars-$5,000), permanent sign-mounted feedback ($8,000-$10,000), speed humps ($2,000-$4,000), neighborhood islands ($15,000-$20,000) and curb extensions (~$25,000). City engineering staff stressed trade-offs (emergency response, long-term effectiveness) and noted that the traffic-calming program is currently unfunded.

Sidewalks, liability and staffing: Russ Kreshko and other streets staff presented maintenance responsibilities for about 300 lane miles and an extensive sidewalk network and said the street-maintenance team has shrunk from six funded positions to four filled positions this year (a 33% reduction). Staff described proactive and reactive approaches to trip hazards: a proactive crew can fix hazards for about $25 each in a planned program, while two hours of reactive labor for an ad hoc response costs roughly $126 (labor plus materials). Staff warned that trip-hazard claims increase the city's insurance exposure and can produce settlements in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars; staff recalled insurer guidance that trip hazards are among the city's higher-risk liabilities.

Funding pressures and next steps: The street fund (fund 111) has a roughly $3.2 million budget baseline but faces revenue underperformance (notably gas-tax receipts) and an unexpected $250,000 insurance shortfall this biennium; staff said the city has relied on transfers from the Transportation Benefit District and anticipates more TBD transfers may be needed to keep operations solvent. Staff proposed creating a dedicated sidewalk maintenance team (three workers), hiring an assistant traffic engineer to expand technical capacity, and returning to council next month with precise cost estimates and funding options. "We need more people," the city engineer said, urging data-driven budget decisions to reduce liability and restore services.

The council requested additional data (costed scenarios, claims history and before/after performance metrics) and asked staff to return with budgeted options to consider during the next budget cycle.