Waste Management Math

In the recent community meeting held at the Maltby Community Club, Waste Management spokesperson Susan Robinson stated that Waste Management plans to park about 200 collection trucks at the site they are developing in Maltby when it becomes operational in 2012. She further stated that those collection trucks would stagger their departure time from the Maltby site between the hours of 4 am to 7 am so to impact traffic as little as possible.

So what kind of impact can we expect? Well, simple math tells us that between 4 am and 7 am is 3 hours or 180 minutes. First cut math tells us that on average a collection truck will leave the Maltby site every 50 seconds or so. If we use Waste Management's assumption that 70% of the collection trucks will go South to enter SR 522 via the Broadway/Yew Way/Paradise Lake Road route, that calculates to about 140 trucks over 180 minutes. That roughly comes out about one truck headed South out of the Waste Management site to go down to SR 522 every 1 minute 15 seconds.

And that assumes a even distribution.

Every minute or so for three hours, a large collection truck will leave Waste Management and join with the semi-trailers from the warehouses just up Broadway a pace and with the lawn service pick-up trucks from 206th to cue up at the Yew/SR 524 intersection. At that corner they will merge with the pumper trucks from 86th and from 87th the cement mixers, the long-bed semi-trailers with all sorts of construction materials, and the dump trucks, many with a towed trailer. All those will line up for a left turn onto Paradise Lake Road from Yew Way to get to SR 522.

Oh, and lets not forget the commuters and school buses. And, of course if the November 4th election goes their way, Community Transit.

Let's further assume that about an average of 10 vehicles can get onto SR 522 every light cycle of 5 minutes. That means that for the hours from 4 am to 7 am, Waste Management trucks will constitute about 50% of the vehicles that access SR 522.

That is if they can get there.

Traffic backs up in Maltby right now without the Waste Management trucks. Rush hour seems to start around 5:45 am and go to about 7:30 am in our neighborhood. The backups are typically past the Maltby Cafe on SR 524 and the railroad tracks on Yew.

The best hope for commuters to get out of Maltby in the morning may be to take Highway 9. This has many residents of Ponderosa Acers and Highland Vista areas upset as commuters may cut through those residential neighborhoods along 206th/78th/201st. The left turn onto Highway 9 from there can be faster than taking turns at the LONG red light from SR 524/Maltby Road to Highway 9.

The only other hope is the completion of the Paradise Lake Road/SR 522 interchange that is currently un-funded and on hold. That would streamline access to SR 522 a bit. With the budget deficit the State is currently facing, funding the estimated $58 million for that interchange doesn't appear to be coming soon.

Oh, and lets not forget all the potholes created by those large vehicles on the rural roads. At least commuters will stay awake as we bounce our way through Maltby.

No matter how you do the math, it looks like commuting from Maltby is adding up to be quite a headache.