Neighborhood Association pushes for expansion of major roundabout in Old Mill to be prioritized
Claire Elmer
Update: Adding video.
BEND, Ore. (KTVZ) — If you drive around Bend, chances are you’re familiar with the Reed Market and Bond Street roundabout at the Old Mill District — and the traffic that comes with it.
An expansion of the roundabout to two lanes was originally slated for completion by July 2026, but the City has pushed the project back to 2030.
In response, the Southern Crossing Neighborhood Association (SCNA) is taking its argument in favor of prioritizing the expansion to the Bend City Council.
New developments in the area have raised concerns for some residents — not just for daily traffic, but fire evacuation routes.
“The whole west side of town, there’s a National Forest there. So if there were wind-driven fire that was coming out of the National Forests, the people on the south and west side of town would be trying to evacuate,” said Todd Torczon, a board member with the SCNA and mechanical engineer by degree.
Because Torczon’s house backs up to Reed Market, he has a front-row seat to watch what he calls a ‘pattern change’ over recent months — increased traffic and longer back-ups. With numerous new housing developments completed and more being constructed, concern over how this highly-used intersection will be impacted is at the forefront of many residents’ minds.
“A full lane of traffic on Reed Market and a full lane of traffic on Bond/Brookswood, and they come to a single lane roundabout. That’s kind of like taking two lanes on a road and squeezing it down to one lane. And what would you expect? Massive backups. It’s impacting visitors, businesses and residents alike. They have the money in the budget. This is just a question of priorities,” stressed Torczon.
The budget Torczon is referring to is the Transportation Construction Fund schedule. According to the schedule, $4.25 million is budgeted for the Bond & Reed Roundabout project, but the majority would not be funded until 2029-2030. The same figures totaling $4.25 million starting in 2026 have been allocated to the Brosterhous & Chase intersection.
The Brosterhous & Chase intersection project, in part, would create a parallel road to Reed Market on the eastside of 3rd Street. The SCNA is hoping that the City Council will reconsider the schedule and prioritize the Bond & Reed Market Roundabout.
In September 2023, ODOT released a report noting the roundabout’s current traffic and safety issues, implying the work should be done sooner rather than later. In its statistics, it claimed the expansion could reduce traffic delays by more than 80 percent.
The Engineering Director for the City of Bend, Ryan Oster, said that fire evacuation routes are taken into consideration; but, said their study suggests the roundabout expansion is not urgent, and was pushed back due to other projects taking precedence.
“That was done so that we could prioritize some other projects in town, just due to the limited funding we had. We did do some initial study work at the Bond Reed Market roundabout a couple of years ago and, at the time, determined that it had the capacity within the system to continue to operate kind of the way it is for a few more years,” said Oster.
Finding a balance between high-risk yet ‘one-off’ events — such as evacuation routes — and day-to-day traffic has been the goal of the City. “You don’t build your entire system out based on, you know, a wildfire evacuation plan, because then the entire system would be eight lanes everywhere. You got to thread that needle and find a healthy point,” Oster reiterated.
The Southern Crossing Association has a survey on its website to get input from you. It intends to take those results to the next City Council meeting to show that the community supports moving up the project’s start date.
To participate in the online survey, you can go to https://bendscna.org/traffic/#roundabout. They are asking that responses be completed by May 31st. It is open to anyone who uses the roundabout and is familiar with traffic in the area, not just those living within the SCNA boundaries.