Nicholas Deshais

Spokane City Councilwoman Candace Mumm received a Walkable Washington Innovation Award this week for her work on a crosswalk ordinance the council adopted last year. At the time the law was passed, Mumm said she hoped to make pedestrian infrastructure a priority for the city....

; "You own a car, not the street. The street belongs to all of us. This is not a war. It's a city." That quote appears at the end of the film Bikes vs. Cars, by Swedish filmmaker Frederik Gertten - a seemingly polemical documentary...

This year will see the completion of Spokane's Downtown Bike Network, a loop and spurs of bikeways for the city's core. For the past few years, downtown cyclists have been able to ride on a few bike lanes and shared roadways (and the infamous "sharrows"),...

This week, I wrote an article about bikes and pavement, and all the new bikeways coming to town this year. In the story, I told of planned Cincinnati Greenway, first of three greenways the city is considering designating in coming years. For those unaware, a...

Finally, Google has mingled my childhood nostalgia with my map obsession by letting us play Pac-Man on Google Maps. Yes, it's awesome running from or chasing ghosts around the South Hill's tangle of streets around Cliff Park, Browne's Addition, Corbin Park, or just about anywhere....

In today's paper, we had an article looking at all the new bikeways coming to Spokane this year. We told you of the Addison-Standard bike corridor and the Cincinnati Greenway. We wrote of the Ben Burr Trail and Downtown Bike Network. But where are those...

Pavement first came to Spokane in 1893, thanks to cyclists. The path was about 5 feet wide and ran next to Broadway Avenue. Unlike the road it paralleled, the bike path was graded, graveled, covered with cinder rock and flattened with a 6-ton roller until it was hard as stone.

The county's Republican Party released a video today, kicking the election year off in grand old fashion. The video is part uplifting, part combative as it first takes on the Spokane City Council, the media and the Democratic Party, before shifting and re-branding itself as...

A documentary coming this summer is all about the People's Car. The one designed by the Nazis. The one my mom drove around for the first ten years of my life. The inimitable Bug. It's called The Bug Movie and I can't wait, for multiple...

Rep. Marcus Riccelli, D-Spokane, said Saturday he would not challenge Spokane Mayor David Condon in this year's city elections. Riccelli, the prime sponsor of a House bill that gave Washington State University the authority, although not the money, to start a new medical school in...

Bike to Work week wants YOU (and a little $)

Seattle's big, fat $900 million transportation levy

As a cyclist who doesn't wear a watch, I sometimes see red at red lights. I mean, come on, I have somewhere to be and I'm probably late! Drivers surely can sympathize. One thing folks in vehicles don't experience is an overly, at times interminable,...

As road construction season commences in Spokane, let's remember a time when roads were something less than they are now.

In the summer of 2013, as Walt Worthy’s plans for a new downtown Spokane hotel were being finalized, Mayor David Condon met with Worthy and promised more than $3.3 million in city funds for the project. In his hand, Condon held a memo written by Jan Quintrall, who led the city’s Business and Developer Services Division, and Scott Chesney, the city’s then-planning director, that laid out “partnership parameters” between Worthy and the city, including up to $2 million in funds to alleviate any pollution in the ground beneath the proposed hotel. The other money went to sidewalk and streetscape improvements and to fee waivers.