Last night members of the Soldotna City Council and City Administrators along with the City Engineer and Mayor invited the public to City Hall to discuss their opinions of the current $2.6 million Binkley St. improvement plans that include the installation of mini roundabouts.
Several people were in favor of them from past experiences they have had in using roundabouts, others that were not so familiar didn’t quite understand the purpose of these roundabouts and saw no reason why a 4-way stop could not suffice to fix traffic problems in Soldotna.
We spoke to Soldotna City Engineer Kyle Kornelis who said he was pleased with the feedback they received.
Kornelis: “Great feedback from the public, there was folks very much in favor of the roundabouts there were others that had some very valid concerns so we’ll take a lot of good input from this meeting and move forward with the preliminary design process and hopefully have some conclusions and some solutions in the near future.”
We asked Kornelis what some of the main core concerns from the public were.
Kornelis: “Core concerns are whether or not merging and the changing traffic patterns is going to be difficult for folks to understand, there’s a lot of concern about winter maintenance, pedestrian conflicts and things of that nature. I think we did a good job of talking about some of those things, some folks were satisfied others weren’t and I hope we can keep widdling away at it eventually find something that works.”
Click here to see a current layout of the Binkley St. project preliminary plans.