hugeasscity

Most Seattle sidewalks are not photogenic.  But to some of us, they are exciting nonetheless.  The sidewalk in the photo above didn’t exist a few months ago.  Back then, if you wanted to walk on Pine Street between one of the city’s most densely populated  neighborhoods and downtown, you could  only cross I-5 on the south side of the overpass.

Call it sidewalk creep.  SDOT is quietly making it happen all over the city, your tax dollars at work via the 2006 Bridging the Gap levy.   As we chip away incrementally, some year we’ll wake up to a walkable city.  And that’s some damn fine sustainable urbanism mojo.

Here’s another beauty completed a couple years ago on Union Street, one leg of a fairly pedestrian unfriendly six-way intersection between Union, Madison, and 12th on Capitol Hill.   That puppy is 16 feet wide (each scored square is 2 x 2 feet).  A curb bulb was also installed on the other side of Union, creating a comfortably narrow pedestrian crossing.

Now that the City Council has approved the Pedestrian Master Plan, we should expect to see even more hot sidewalk action in the future.  Well, probably.  Sidewalks ain’t cheap—typical cost is about $2 million per mile, or about $100,000 per city block face.   So far the city has committed to spending $15 million per year on the Ped Master Plan. 

The total cost of impementing everything in the Ped Master plan is in the range of $900 million.  Did somebody say “priorities?”

Posted by dan bertolet on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 9:36 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.