A traffic engineering expert speaking at a public symposium Friday bashed Spokane’s plan to build the Lincoln Street Bridge.

“We’re very interested in what is the justification for that facility,” said Walter Kulash, a senior traffic engineer with an Orlando, Fla., firm that specializes in community planning.

The bridge will handle only slightly more traffic than the Post Street Bridge, is a “single-minded” approach to improving the city’s air quality problem and will speed people over the Spokane Falls, which instead should be shown off as an attraction, Kulash said.

Kulash was a panelist invited to address issues of downtown revitalization at a free, daylong symposium at The Met, sponsored by Eastern Washington University. The forum, attended by about 100 people, was a sequel to last year’s, which critiqued downtown Spokane. Friday’s session was directed at finding solutions.

Chris Hugo, a city planner who alone represented City Hall on the panel, defended the Lincoln Street Bridge plan, saying the bridge needs to be built to ease air pollution and because the Post Street Bridge is crumbling.

But after debating Kulash for several minutes, Hugo said, “I’m ambivalent about the bridge,” adding that he’d listen to proposals “if we could find a way to not do this bridge.”

Reconfiguring one-way streets in downtown Spokane would help alleviate traffic congestion more than the Lincoln Street Bridge, Kulash said, responding to questions from the audience.

One-way streets increase trip time by about 30 percent because drivers are forced to turn repeatedly, he said. They’re also harmful to pedestrians who confront turning traffic more frequently as they try to cross the street.

Spokane should be doing things to highlight its “spectacularly” beautiful riverfront, Kulash said, rather than speeding the traffic past it.

Panelist Charles Royer agreed.

The walkway to the falls is a “very forbidding and unpleasant environment,” said Royer, former three-term Seattle mayor and senior lecturer at the University of Washington’s Graduate School of Public Affairs.

Creating an attractive walkway to the water would make it a destination, Royer said. “People would fall in love with it.”

Panelist Donovan Rypkema applauded the city for its efforts to add housing downtown, saying that it’s an effective way to bolster the downtown economy.

Rypkema blasted the city, however, for its lack of a friendly street environment.

“You have a whole bunch of parking garages that are extraordinarily anti-pedestrian,” he said, adding that skywalks also hurt because they remove people from the street.

But Spokane shouldn’t expect to find a single, over-reaching solution to its problems, Rypkema said. Downtown revitalization is an ongoing process, which requires the contribution of many different projects.

“You’re smokin’ opium if you think there’s a quick fix,” Rypkema said.

, DataTimes