Carpenters have an old saying: Measure twice cut once. It’s a way to avoid wasting a lot of building material.

The city’s version of that slogan might be: Plan twice build once. As illustrated by the current situation with George Williams Way, it might have saved both taxpayers and developers a lot of money.

It’s hard to tell, though, whether the need to tear up the almost-new intersection of Sixth Street and George Williams Way to add up to five north-south traffic lanes was a product of not enough planning by the city or too much.

Less that two years after the intersection was expanded, a proposed development at Sixth Street and George Williams Way stands poised to make it obsolete. George Williams Way is a two-lane street with a center turn lane both north and south of Sixth Street, but the traffic load expected for new developments on the northwest and southwest corners of the intersection will require up to seven lanes to handle straight and turning traffic.

City Manager David Corliss is recommending that the city pay $200,000 of the cost of expanding the intersection and developers pay the rest. Brian Kubota who has plans to develop the southwest corner of the intersection said he already had paid $1 million to extend George Williams Way to the south and now expects to pay $1.2 million to expand it. He estimates he could have saved about $350,000 if a larger street had been built in the first place.

The problem, Corliss said, resulted from the city’s policy of building streets only to the size needed when they are opened. “It is important that we get infrastructure in ahead of development,” he said.

That seems like a reasonable idea but it only works if the city can provide a predictable development picture through its planning process. Otherwise, infrastructure may be expanded to areas that never develop.

The northwest corner of George Williams Way and Sixth Street is a great example of the unpredictability of the city’s planning. The Horizon 2020 plan produced in the mid-1990s barely looked at that plot but saw its future as a low-density residential area. The Northwest Area Plan adopted in 1997 and the Transportation 2025 plan adopted in September 2002 showed the area as commercial, but the K-10 Nodal Plan, approved in November 2003 designated it for office use, with commercial uses farther west.

With that kind of planning, it’s a little hard to tell how large an intersection is needed, that is, until a developer comes along and forces the city to commit to a plan. Unfortunately, by then it may be too late.

Local developers long have sought more predictability in the city’s planning process. The George Williams Way fiasco offers a window on why that predictability is important to local taxpayers as well.