In 2020, the city began to rebuild stretches of Indian Trail Road in northwest Spokane, which had poor pavement conditions. As a resident of Indian Trail, cyclist and burgeoning infrastructure advocate, I had high hopes the project would reallocate street space according to a 2011 resolution – let’s call it “Complete Streets 1.0” – that required the city to add bicycle and pedestrian facilities when doing publicly funded work on an arterial street.
On paper, Indian Trail Road would seem like a good candidate for reallocation: it was a wide and dangerous arterial with a rampant speeding problem, was the only way in and out of the neighborhood, had no cycling infrastructure and even sported “center turn lanes” where there was nothing to turn into. There were no shoulders nor parking strips for much of it, so walking on its sidewalks meant tolerating drivers thundering by in their cars at 45 miles per hour mere feet from a pedestrian’s elbow.
You can imagine my disappointment when the street was re-striped with precisely the exact design as it had pre-construction. Even today, it has five lanes of traffic next to houses, turn lanes to nowhere, no traffic calming to be seen, sidewalks directly next to fast traffic and no bike facilities – neither parallel to it nor on it. It feels anything but “Complete”, despite being resurfaced long after the passage of Complete Streets 1.0. The city’s dereliction of its duty to provide safe infrastructure via this project is what spurred me to become more seriously involved in transportation advocacy — a path that has since included writing for RANGE.
If you’re wondering how Indian Trail Road was re-striped with no changes, one can only assume the project fell victim to one of the exemptions carved out in Complete Streets 1.0, which have been liberally used by the city in the past 14 years. The simplest one to use was an arbitrary assessment of the cost of accommodating those outside a vehicle compared to the value of the usage (as if there’s a scientific method of determining the monetary value of cyclist and pedestrian safety). I’m sure that was never used to weasel out of doing the hard and necessary work to make safety the true number one priority!
Additionally, the original resolution called for the “mayor’s design advisory committee” to review exemptions to keep the city accountable to its own stated goal of “safe, convenient, and comfortable routes for walking, bicycling, and public transportation.” To my knowledge, that committee has never existed.
The usage of these exemptions in projects across the city has undoubtedly cost us lives.
Fortunately, on August 6, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown signed into law what’s become colloquially known as “Complete Streets 2.0.” The rewrite was spearheaded by Director of Transportation and Sustainability, Jon Snyder, who also spearheaded the 2011 version during his term as a city council member, alongside then-advocates and now-council members Kitty Klitzke and Paul Dillon. The resolution eliminates several of the exemptions found in its predecessor – including the arbitrary cost one – and requires the city to abide by industry standards for street and bike facility design. It also ensures Transportation Commission – a real, existing board* created by the Brown administration – reviews projects seeking exemptions.
The science is clear: complete streets are safer for everyone, whether one is traveling by foot or bike or motorcycle or bus or car. I am optimistic this new law will improve safety for us all.
*As a member of Transportation Commission, I voted to support Complete Streets 2.0, and was proud to stand by the mayor as she signed it into law.
