Council to consider purchasing key property to finish Ben Burr Trail

Few dare to ride a bike downtown from Spokane’s East Central neighborhood. If the steep hills and freeway crossings weren’t harrowing enough, there’s also no real bike route, unless you feel like sharing a lane on East Sprague or Trent avenues.

Then there’s the Ben Burr Trail.

On Monday, the Spokane City Council will consider purchasing one of the last properties needed to complete the redevelopment of the southeast Spokane trail, which will include widening, paving and extending it from its current western terminus near Liberty Park to the University District. The property, near Riverpoint campus, will cost the city $170,000.

The $1.7 million project is being funded predominantly with federal transportation grants, and is expected to be completed next year. Those transportation dollars aim to reduce road traffic and their use also comes with the requirement to meet federal trail standards.

Other funding for the project includes $250,000 in federal air quality funds and a $62,500 local match.

According to the city’s Master Bike Plan, the trail is among the three most important trails in the Spokane bikeway network, along with Fish Lake and Centennial trails. With Ben Burr’s completion it will be less than 3 miles long and a cyclist can ride from the center of one of Spokane’s most isolated neighborhoods to Coeur d’Alene or Cheney without really sharing the road with a car.

“It’s a pain to ride from East Central,” said Seth Battista, a bike commuter who lives on Regal Street just south of the trail. He is also the vice chairman of the city’s Bicycle Advisory Board. “This trail is going to be great. If you’re on the east side of the South Hill, you’ll have a connection downtown.”

Louis Meuler, a city planner who works with the advisory board, said the neighborhood has long sought to get a safe, designated trail to the city’s core.

“That area, from a bicycling perspective, is kind of deficient in facilities,” Meuler said.

While it’s true the neighborhood wanted a trail to connect with the Centennial Trail, Jerry Numbers, chairman of the East Central Neighborhood Council who has been involved in the neighborhood for 50 years, said the city took it too far.

“They took it to a whole other level,” Numbers said. “They brought the plan to us and said, ‘Look at what we did for you folks. Aren’t we wonderful?’ We didn’t think so and opposed it. It’s becoming a bike freeway.”

In Numbers’ telling, a quiet, graveled path that’s good for kids and dog walking is being widened to accommodate “high-speed bikes.”

Battista said he understood Numbers’ concerns but that they were unfounded.

“The great thing about Ben Burr being paved is it’s not Centennial and it’s not Fish Lake. People do their triathlon training on those and hammer away,” he said. “They won’t come to Ben Burr. It’s too short. The only people using Ben Burr will be commuters. Like me. I want to take my big butt with my 50-pound panniers and go 4 mph on that trail.”

In 1999, the city secured federal money to design the Ben Burr and Fish Lake trails. At the time, both trails were undeveloped but in the intervening years, 7 miles of Fish Lake Trail have been paved, while Ben Burr remains graveled. The southeast Spokane trail uses an abandoned Spokane and Inland Empire Railroad Co. interurban rail line, which used to transport passengers within Spokane, as well as to Liberty, Hayden and Coeur d’Alene lakes.

The trail – as well as a park and street in the south of town – is named after a Great Northern Railway engineer, Benjamin E. Burr, who began his 48-year career in the early 1900s by hiking through wilderness to survey a short rail line.

It is perhaps fitting that a trail designed to get more people out of cars and onto bikes is named after Burr. He died in 1965 after sustaining injuries in an automobile accident in downtown Spokane at the age of 78.