SALEM – The traffic snarls that spawned the new Bend parkway have become a poster child for a proposed state policy for highway bypasses.

The chief goal: preventing alternate routes – which are built to ease congestion on highways – from becoming equally congested.

Yet while that may be a worthy goal, a bevy of officials and activists, including Redmond Mayor Alan Unger, are asking the state’s transportation commission to take a go-slow approach because they worry what the fine print might mean to drivers and neighborhoods.

The five-member panel, which oversees the Oregon Department of Transportation, staged a public hearing Thursday.

”We want to protect the mobility functions of new and planned bypasses over the long term,” Craig Greenleaf, a senior state highway planner, told commission members.

The proposed rules would foster faster traffic flows by limiting local access, both by forbidding commercial driveways and even connections to most local streets.

But Aleta Root, who lives in the Sunset View subdivision just south of Bend, said she opposes any plan that will make it harder for in-town drivers to use bypasses. For instance, she doesn’t want to see access to Highway 97 restricted at China Hat Road.

”At this point they want to discourage local people on the Parkway and they don’t want truck traffic on major roads,” she said. ”So where do they go? Residential roads.”

In Bend, the state steered traffic from U.S. Highway 97 in the early 1960s onto Third Street as a bypass from the original route downtown.

But the corridor attracted dense commercial development and was crisscrossed by local streets, and the eventual result was a several-mile stretch often lit up with brake lights like a holiday display.

So the new Bend parkway was built – at a cost of $115 million – to bypass the Third street bypass. It opened in September 2001.

The proposed standards would apply to any new bypass projects – including an alternative route to U.S. 97 in Redmond – plus as many as 16 existing routes statewide.

The new Bend parkway is on that list and already meets most of the proposed limited-access guidelines, said Bob Bryant, Central Oregon’s ODOT manager.

However, if the proposed rules had been in place, the parkway would feature fewer connections to local streets including Revere, Lafayette and Hawthorne streets, he said.

The new policy could come into play as the state moves forward with the so-called South Bend Refinement Plan, which will eliminate three traffic signals on the parkway route.

The plan urges communities to steer local traffic onto frontage roads that would parallel the bypasses – but not dump local traffic onto the bypasses.

It also discourages commercial development along the routes, which could help reduce the relocation of businesses from downtown.

Redmond Mayor Unger said in a letter that he’s concerned that the rules are too inflexible in their goal of reducing local access of bypasses.

”We need to allow the through-traffic to skirt downtowns and at the same time have access to downtowns for economic viability,” he said.

Unger said bypass standards also ought to allow on- and off-ramps to places like the Redmond airport, county fairgrounds, emergency facilities and industrial sites, which would minimize the presence of trucks on local streets.

Art Schlack, a lobbyist for the Association of Oregon Counties, said officials generally agree that new rules are necessary for new bypasses, but not for existing ones.

In particular, local officials are wary of encouraging more traffic from existing routes onto local streets or rezoning land in order to reduce heavy commercial activity near bypasses, he said.

”We are interested in a bypass policy that protects the facility but also is workable at a local level,” he said.

Jeff Hamm, a public transit official from Salem, said the state also ought to design bypasses to encourage more use of carpools and buses, such as park-and-ride lots and access only for those vehicles.

Bend resident Root said the new rules would be a poor fit for Central and Eastern Oregon because the region is made up of smaller cities that do not have extensive street grid systems – so drivers need to use bypasses.

James Sinks can be reached at 503-566-2839 or at jamess@cyberis.net