Amid crashes, roundabout near Walmart may be in Lebanon's future (2024)

Lebanon may install a traffic circle near theWalmart Supercenterafter officials earlier this month amended some planning documents to qualify for grants and offset some of the estimated $4 million needed to unsnarl traffic.

Planning officials audibly groaned after interim city manager Ron Whitlatch proposed a single-lane roundabout, meant to channel cars as they maneuver out of one of the city’s busiest driveways and through the intersection of Cascade and Weldwood drives in South Lebanon.

“Roundabouts are one of those things when you first drive one, you go, ‘Oh, my gosh— this is terrible,’” Whitlatch said. “But as you get used to them, I think in low-speed areas, they function really well.”

But cars were colliding at higher than expected rates turning left onto Weldwood, engineers wrote, away from Walmart and toward Highway 20.

The 2020 study by Kittelson & Associates, a nationwide firm with offices in Bend and Portland, predicted Colonia Paz would add 50 daily vehicle trips across the intersection, where stop signs control traffic on Cascade, in one direction, across Weldwood.

Engineers recommended Lebanon paint striping on the road surface and improve driver visibility around the intersection — short-term fixes totaling an estimated $150,000. And the most likely long-term fix, a traffic signal, would back traffic up at Weldwood’s intersection with the big east-west Highway 20 that serves as Lebanon’s main drag.

“So, we looked at a roundabout,” Whitlatch told the city’s planning commission in April.

But those roads, Boulder Falls and Mullins drives, don't see nearly as much traffic.

The city’s expanding in the south, too, with proposed subdivisions poised to add hundreds of residents and vehicle trips near Walmart. And the city doesn’t allow commercial development with direct access to Highway 20 south of the Cascade-Weldwood intersection under Lebanon’s planning policies.

Additional traffic for now would be routed onto Weldwood, where cars and commercial trucks already make thousands of trips each day.

The state counted an average 14,859 vehicle trips on Highway 20 south of Weldwood in 2022. Vehicles made a daily average 20,488 trips to the north, according to Oregon Department of Transportation figures.

Whitlatch told planning commissioners the city intends to build the island at the center of the roundabout with low-angle curbs, assuming that trucks accidentally will pull semitrailers across it.

“We want something low maintenance, so if we’re looking at landscaping out there — no,” Whitlatch said. “Maybe we’ll put a statue in the middle of it.”

Elected leaders learned in an August 2023 staff report that city plans accounted for a lot of the projected growth — and additional cars — but not at Cascade and Weldwood drives. Lebanon last updated its citywide transportation plan in 2018, according to the city’s top planning official, Kelly Hart.

“As development occurs, sometimes we need to amend the document,” Hart told city councilors May 8. “This has happened.”

Engineers estimated $4 million for the proposed intersection overhaul, which Lebanon can’t afford. But marking the project in Lebanon’s planning documents allows the city to apply for grant funding.

The hefty price tag promptedCouncilor KJ Ullfers to remark: “$4 million for a roundabout?”

No one replied.

“Traffic circles aren’t new — they’re new to the area,” Hart said later by phone.

Lebanon hasn’t set a deadline for the roundabout’s construction, but is set on improving the flow of cars at Walmart.

“With the people at Walmart having to drive around the traffic circle, it’ll be much safer than having to stop and wait and then try to drive across six lanes of traffic,” Hart said.

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