Bellingham Roundabout By Bob Sanders

Buoyed by the success of roundabouts in Cordata and increasingly aware of impressive traffic slowdowns on the Guide Meridian at

Squalicum Parkway

and

Birchwood Avenue

traffic lights, the Bellingham City Council has unanimously expressed interest in a super roundabout.

Described as being peanut shaped, the likely project-to-be appears to have a lot going for it.  Unanimity by the Council on a project with a $5 million price tag is not easy to come by these days.  Already there have been jocular references to the “peanut roundabout” and the Bellingham Herald recently reported that a much smaller companion roundabout, to be located 500 feet west on Squalicum, is now being called the “unsalted version.”  Public scorn may be just around the corner.

What the roundabout needs is some beguiling panache, a creative step forward, if you will to deep six disdain replacing it with mystique.

Warning flags went up when I heard that descriptive phrase “peanut shaped.”  Can’t you just hear hip ‘hamsters, not content with calling Guide Meridian “The Guide,” referencing the unique roundabout as “The Peanut” as in “to get to St. Joseph Hospital, you come south on The Guide, then take The Peanut about a mile to what eventually takes you left  to Birchwood and the hospital.  Nothing to it on The Peanut.”

Who needs The Peanut, anyway?  Peanut identification in the Fourth Corner is a mistake for any number of reasons.  In the first place, what is the connection between

Bellingham

and peanuts?  Planters Peanuts, Mr. Peanut, the late jazz musician “Peanuts” Hucko (were he alive) and Jimmy Carter might like the association, but let’s be realistic.  A Peanut Roundabout could be a perfect fit for Godforsaken,

Georgia

or Nowhere,

North Carolina

but, hey, this is the Fourth Corner where we think Hooters before Hoody’s.  Further, legume worship already is in shuckingly good hands in

Ashburn

,

Georgia

, a bastion of goober reverence where the world’s tallest homage to the groundpea, a 20 ft. monument, is located.   

Lest this situation get out of hand, there is a solution to the obvious problem.  Let’s render in-operative all references to peanut shape, The Peanut and The Unsalted Peanut and replace them with a bold concept: Number 8.

Tied to the concept is the good fortune attached to the number.  Recall the opening of the Beijing Olympics on

8/8/08

, an inauguration determined by the significance of the number 8 in Chinese culture. 

Further, in this age of corporate steamrolling, let’s make some money for

Bellingham

and our Soon-to-Be Incredibly Famous No. 8 Roundabout.  Let’s sell naming rights to a member of Corporate

America

.  Let’s honor No. 8, just like major league baseball does to ball parks.  If

Houston

can have its

Minute

 

Maid

 

Park

and Seattle Safeco Field, let’s create for the betterment of

Bellingham

a nonpareil natural: The Super Motel 8 Roundabout.

Selling naming rights to

Bellingham

’s Soon-to-Be Incredibly Famous Motel 8 Roundabout will bring largesse to reduced city coffers and result in the first of many Motel 8s as

Bellingham

becomes a hotbed of Fourth Corner motel development.  The first of two circles in the roundabout is the perfect place for a Motel 8 flagship operation.

Such a coup should work a positive effect on

Bellingham

’s money shortfall, already the source of intense bleating by Mayor Dan Pike and the City Council.  A microcosm of those monetary shortages lie a couple of miles north of the future home of The Soon-To-Be Incredibly Famous Super Motel 8 Roundabout, if you’ll pardon the slight narrative detour.  That would be in Cordata, recently awarded Cordata Park, the neighborhood’s one and only and a long time coming.  While the park exists in name, there is nothing on the City’s drawing boards for the next six years to make the park possible by extending

Horton Rd.

--the park’s only entrance opportunity where a close-by parking lot is planned. This tale of disappointment brings to mind further delineation of Catch 22 under the sub heading of: Details, Details. 

Ah, then, what to do about the other zero’s far ranging possibilities?  Think, for example, of

8/8/08

in

Palm Springs

,

CA

and round-the-clock marriages at City Hall among the matrimonially -inclined who dealt themselves in on the date’s good fortune. The Soon-To-Be Incredibly Famous Super Motel 8 Roundabout might very well include a Forever 8/8/08 Wedding Chapel where calendars and clocks never change except when 9/9/09, 10/10/10, 11/11/11 and 12/12/12 roll around.   

And, for those inclined to feel that Cooperstown, New York is too far away to travel for reassurance that baseball is truly America’s great pastime, the Soon-To-Be Incredibly Famous Super Motel 8 Roundabout’s vast properties might include a Fourth Corner Wing of the Hall of Fame featuring inductees who once wore number 8.  Among them are Joe Morgan, Cal Ripkin, Carl Yastremski and Yogi Berra, the latter famous for rules of the road observations including: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it” and “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re driving because you might not get there.”

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Comments

[R Lovaas]

The problem with that intersection is the crazy lights. People on Squalicum have to wait 20 minutes, while the Green's on exclusively for Cornwall Park. That's ridiculous. The lights need retiming. They're needed only for left turns from the side streets.

[R Lovaas]

You know, traffic circles in the East and Europe are 1-2000 feet in diameter, leaving plenty of room for 3 or 4 lanes of traffic, including tractor/trailers.

Why does Whatcom County have toy circles?