LETTER: Reader can't believe bypass was built so inadequately

Re: your editorial of last month, “Bypass at last. Can you believe it?”:

Pulling a trailer, I was excited to bypass the courthouse and Main Street and try the first phase a couple of years ago. I could not believe it! A rude awakening from the start. Being in the slow (right) lane heading north, I had expected a smooth flowing transition onto the bypass. Wrong! There were not sufficient info/warning signs that I should veer into the left turning lane to make almost a 90 degree turn after the traffic light.

And then the roundabouts. I couldn’t believe them either! Probably the only worse ones are in Missoula. The whole bypass must have been engineered by a bunch of pre-schoolers high on Kool-Aid and driving little toy cars on a road map.

Having been a military policeman at West Point with much of our responsibility being traffic control, making frequent trips into New York City, then spending two years driving all over Germany, the next eight months battling traffic in Los Angeles, as well as touring 40 states, I can’t remember any roads as poorly engineered as those in Western Montana. While there is usually enough barrow pit room, the lack of acceleration and deceleration lanes makes for extremely dangerous driving.

If we had the money wasted on years of EPA, EIS, ad infinitum studies, plus inept engineer and surveyor fees, there would have been plenty of money for a proper smooth flowing truck-friendly overpass sans stoplights.

As for roundabouts, we should have left that idea to the Europeans who had sense enough to make much larger traffic circles. Plain intersections would have made more sense and been safer for the Kalispell bypass. To give it another chance, I took the bypass again last week with my trailer and found the new signage more confusing than before. I actually got lost and had to travel a ways until I could make a U-turn and get back on 93. Next week I’ll take my trailer around the courthouse and up Main.

Probably too late to inject any common sense, user-friendly engineering into the mix, but at least you will have your bypass. Better alert your weed board, though. The highway median and barrow pit seeding the Highway Department did south of Polson gave us several new weed varieties, including sagebrush, which is non-native to this area. —Gil Mangels, Polson