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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

North-south parkway is all Spokane needs

Greg Higgins Special to The Spokesman-Review

In 1970, while a student at Washington State University, I worked with Citizens Against Residential Freeways and was proud to have helped that community organization stop the planned freeway up Hamilton and Nevada. I was supportive then of a corridor where portions are now under construction. But it has recently dawned on me that an immense transportation planning bubble is looming over Spokane: the bloated North Spokane Corridor.

When completed, the new freeway is designed to handle 150,000 vehicles a day. The vehicle flow on Interstate 90, where the ramps will eventually connect to the North Spokane Corridor, currently averages 95,000 vehicles a day. In addition, the combined average vehicle flow of U.S. Highways 2 and 395 at the northern end of the corridor is 56,150 vehicles a day (all using Washington Department of Transportation’s average daily traffic data).

Let’s consider a scenario in which one-third of the drivers on I-90 (probably an overestimate) will head north using the new freeway. Such a scenario amounts to 31,700 vehicles daily. Next, let’s speculate that one-third of the vehicles heading north and south along U.S. 2 and 395 take the new freeway to head south to I-90, or points in between (again, likely an overestimate). This amounts to a traffic flow of 18,700 vehicles. Together, these numbers total only 50,400 vehicles a day, or slightly over one-third the design capacity of the North Spokane Corridor.

Planners look to the future, and the corridor’s designers are surely taking into account urban growth. Yet even assuming that the Spokane area population doubles in the next 50 years, at best this would double usage estimates for the North Spokane Corridor to 100,000 vehicles a day. This is still only two-thirds of the design capacity on the dubious assumption that the Spokane area will see a population of 900,000 in 50 years.

The announcement in January by Sens. Lisa Brown and Chris Marr, proposing to trim $730 million off the project by making three miles of the corridor four lanes instead of eight, caught my attention. How could such a radical change be possible if the vehicle flow assumptions were correct?

Then I discovered that this reduction was temporary, until another billion dollars or more can be found to finish out an eight-lane super-freeway that connects to largely imaginary population growth centers.

Making matters worse, the new, scaled-down plan for those three miles means we will be stuck with an undivided four-lane highway for possibly a decade or more. We know undivided highways are inherently dangerous. And what will happen with the 150 feet or more of right-of-way left idle? Sterilized dirt?

I am not an expert in transportation planning, but I have observed in my years as an architect that the big mistakes, if they are going to occur, start at the planning phase. This is when mission creep can take over, and before you know it a project unsuited to the actual needs of a client (in this case, the citizens of our region) is under way. While my arithmetic is approximate, it nonetheless illustrates the extreme assumptions the Department of Transportation’s planners are making to foist a project of this size on Spokane.

What can be done? It is not too late to convert the super-freeway into the limited-access, four-lane parkway it should have always been (albeit a parkway that accepts truck traffic). The northernmost portions, now under construction, are designed at a reasonable two lanes in each direction. The much larger eight-mile, eight-lane segment connecting to I-90 is still in the design stage and could be scaled down. This change is about saving not only money, but also the environment along both sides of the corridor.

Let’s stop this boondoggle and get a north-south corridor parkway built in five years, not 20. Line the parkway on both sides with trees. Shift funds to other badly needed transportation projects, such as our undersized freight rail system, which must grow if we are serious about reducing fossil fuel consumption. And let’s not forget general street upgrades.

Burst the North Spokane Corridor bubble for the good of Spokane.

Greg Higgins is an architect in Spokane.