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…