To Improve a STROAD: How One City Is Reimagining an Orphan Highway // Aurora Avenue in Seattle

depending on where you grew up the word Aurora may or may not have a specific Association for you when you grow up in Seattle though the word Aurora can really only be associated with one thing which is this we're going to talk about the past the present and the maybe more promising future of an archetypal Strode and it's coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always encouraged but this one's all me now I've done two videos on strodes in Las Vegas but that's the Sun Belt and well what'd you expect but this week I'm in Seattle one of America's most Progressive cities by reputation and you just think they would know better and full disclosure I grew up in this neck of the woods so this week is personal so I'm not going to do the usual thing where I find a bunch of ridiculous stuff like Billboards for personal injury attorneys and make fun of them although there were advertisements for personal injury attorneys in Seattle they were just on the buses I am going to take you on a tour of the corridor and we're gonna see some very dumb things but today I really want to focus on real problems that affect people's everyday lives and what advocacy groups public agencies and elected officials are trying to do about it and my hope here is that today's video can provide some lessons and maybe some inspiration for people who are looking to transform strodes in their own cities okay let's set this up with some historical background like a lot of strodes Aurora is a legacy State Highway I'm gonna come back to this later in the video because it is really an important Point Aurora is State Route 99 and it was the major north south route through this city of Seattle before Interstate 5 opened in the 1960s various parts of Aurora have existed for a long time as pre-automobile trade routes but I'd put the birth of the Aurora we know today as 1932 the year the Aurora Bridge over the Ship Canal opened this 1948 traffic flow map from an old Civics textbook kind of illustrates how important Aurora was for most of the 20th century there's no I-5 here this other thick band to the east is old highway 522 or Lake City Way before I-5 got bulldozed through North Seattle there's another important thing about this map the city limits at the time only extended to 85th Street or a bit north where today Seattle proper extends all the way to 145th what this means is much of North Seattle urbanized as an unincorporated area with a hodgepodge of infrastructure and Utility Services you still see this today day with most streets north of 85th not having proper sidewalks or drainage I'm going to come back to this when we tour Aurora because it's really important so the mid 20th century was really the peak of American optimism around the transformative potential of the automobile and a lot of Aurora reflects that the street teamed with ostentatiously auto-oriented uses some of which still exist today lots of motels sprang up up and down Aurora particularly when the World's Fair came to town in 1962 it's a testament to how little has changed on a lot of Aurora that so many of those motels still exist although some of them maybe for more unsavory purposes than they were originally intended yeah I've served a lot of I don't know activities along Aurora that I just didn't really want to film or subject you to but I trust you can fill in the blanks so let's set up the area I'm going to start at 83rd down by Green Lake and I'm going to go all the way up to 160th into the city of Shoreline this isn't to say that Aurora isn't problematic outside the steady area it is but my time is limited and I wanted to make sure I covered the strodiest part of the most strody Strode in the city so let's first confirm that what we're dealing with here is in fact a Strode which is a facility that attempts to provide the mobility functions of a highway while performing the commercial functions of an urban Main Street and kind of failing at both check now the segment of Aurora we're looking at exists almost entirely within two designated Urban Villages Bitter Lake and Aurora lichton Springs the Urban Village designation means these are intended to be compact mixed-use neighborhoods that support walking and Transit use and provide services and employment in close proximity to residences and it's easy to say that we're failing to live up to the stated comprehensive plan designations but let's look at something the region has put in place that should set Aurora up for future success and that's the rapid ride e-line rapid ride is King County Metro's quasi-bus Rapid Transit service it has wider stop spacing than a typical bus line like about five blocks usually and more bus priority treatments so it's going to have a faster run time and better reliability than a typical bus service also real-time arrival information and more stop amenities Than You'll usually see the e-line is the busiest bus route in the Puget Sound region which meant a lot more before Northgate link opened in late 2021 but it is really still pretty impressive you could say at this point the two busiest Transit routes in the Puget Sound region run parallel through North Seattle about a mile apart in some places but they're very different so Services Aurora generally has time restricted bus lanes for the e-line meaning General traffic is allowed to use the lanes at off-peak times and of course the irony is General traffic doesn't really seem to need or use the lanes if it isn't a peak time anyway so just something to think about when we look to redesign so here's a conundrum nothing about Aurora feels particularly Transit oriented so why is the e-line so busy well it has priority when it needs it it's pretty frequent about every three to five minutes at peak times every five to ten minutes most of the off-peak times it touches a lot of strong housing and employment areas and most importantly I think because of the way Aurora was designed as a state highway it is a flat straight line which is not that common in Seattle never underestimate the power of expensive but very good Urban geometry the upshot here is the e-line is an extremely Democratic service for a very diverse population on a roadway that's kind of a mess otherwise so let's talk about this this is the intersection of Aurora and 85th which is a bit of a Strode on Strode violence situation is it as egregious as what we looked at in Suburban Las Vegas in terms of Street cross sections no it isn't but Suburban Las Vegas isn't even pretending to be an urban environment but this is well well inside of Seattle City Limits keep in mind we're pretty close to Green Lake here it's not a cheap area to live but even this segment of Aurora has all kinds of issues besides the fact that it isn't aesthetically pleasing by any standard I always ask myself if you were designing a major Urban Main Street from scratch today what would you want it to look like well you probably wouldn't have long curb Cuts with a bunch of head in parking I actually had to stop and wait for the buzz to pass just so I could walk safely at this location I'm not going to spend a lot of time ridiculing Strode land uses today but let's just talk about self-storage facilities really quick I'll probably go deeper on this in a future video but these are probably the quote-unquote densest land use is on Aurora and a lot of them have been built fairly recently instead of you know Apartments within the same size of a building envelope you could tell most of these are new because ironically even though by definition they aren't really pedestrian friendly land uses they are the places where sidewalks have been rebuilt to newer city standards so they're the most Pleasant places to walk okay let's move into the heart of the Aurora wigton Springs Urban Village this is the one place in the study area that really has the kind of Main Street Building stock that hints at the streets potential even though it isn't super well utilized now there are other important pieces here a Bikeway that crosses at 100th and Oak Tree Village at the northeast corner which might be getting ripe for another round of Redevelopment it isn't the bustling place it was maybe 20 years ago but I do think that advertising they have on the EV charging stations is pretty funny this is a good place to talk about pedestrian Crossings signalized intersections along Aurora aren't that frequent and for the most part if there isn't a signalized intersection you aren't going to get any kind of delineated pedestrian Crossing there are a couple pedestrian Bridges which are not really anything you'd ever build today including this one at 102nd which got updated with some colorful art recently in my professional life prior to being a YouTuber I've advocated for pedestrian Crossing spacing standards to ensure there are appropriate Crossing treatments at good frequency particularly in transit heavy Main Street contexts but you still don't see these kinds of standards as much all I'm saying is people are going to cross where they want to cross on streets like this and the street design should account for what people actually do and not vice versa okay let's move north of 110th where we're in kind of a transition zone between the wicton springs and Bitter Lake Urban Villages this is where Aurora and the e-line pass through the Evergreen washelli Cemetery which dates from 1885. I've had people ask me to do a video on Urban cemeteries and yeah there's probably some sense in which it's a worse land use than a golf course but I'm not going there and no probably not the busiest stop on the e-line The Bitter Lake Urban Village starts coming into Focus once you get north of 115th self-storage oriented Transit big box stores lots of quality lodging establishments but also bougie grocery stores and weird maybe high-end used car dealerships it's just very eclectic there's an old pedestrian overcrossing right at 130th pretty useless today since there's actually a crosswalk in this leg of the intersection but the most notable feature once we get to this section is we're well into the North End of Seattle proper now so sidewalks are few and far between and look I understand the sidewalk infill is sometimes cost prohibitive because of topography or it's a low priority area because there's nowhere to walk in the first place but come on this area is pancake flat there's a lot of retail and restaurants that people could walk to if it was safe and comfortable and obviously people do walk to those places regardless it's legitimately awful and it's been this way for decades even at Corners with signalized Crossings it's just a shoulder with really awful pavement condition this has historically been one of those corridors where you'll find auto dealerships which is generally not my favorite Urban land use in the the first place but apparently this is what passes for acceptable loading and unloading operations on this segment of Aurora you just roll into what's the only possible pedestrian Zone and block the whole thing I guess the city's okay with this I did want to talk drive-throughs for a second though there's always some fast food chain that's a big deal when it opens and they go in and out of style a lot of times it's this chain recently but this location didn't have nearly the lines I've seen in a place like Vegas even though it did have a double lane drive through I didn't understand it until I realized people in Seattle actually park and go into fast food joints eh Regional differences so the lack of any kind of mixed-use development along Aurora despite it having the busiest bus line in the region is honestly just crazy but let's take a moment to head less than a quarter mile West to Linden Avenue which is part of a long Greenway that's on the footprint of what used to to be an Interurban trolley line The Greenway includes a low stress bike route along Fremont Avenue which is a residential street through much of North Seattle and the old right-of-way for the inter-urban line which starts at 1 10th and runs up to around 200th Street in Shoreline what's amazing here is along Windon Avenue between 130th and 145th within the Bitter Lake Urban Village there's more housing density than there is basically along all of Aurora through the entirety of North Seattle so somehow as a city we've made it more attractive to have bike oriented development along a relatively quiet Street then we have Transit oriented development along one of the most productive Transit streets in the city don't get me wrong I love bike oriented development but I really think it illustrates how much we've failed the Aurora Corridor in the last several decades when it feels like we should have known better as sort of a final contrast let's look at where the Interurban Trail crosses into Shoreline and where intersex Aurora Avenue up around 155th Street the trail has a bit of a different feel once you get north of 145th and you can see new housing density that's getting constructed where there's an old Sears building and a shopping center that's in transition even Aurora itself has a bit of a different character here with actual sidewalks and a planted median it's still not beautiful but it definitely has a different feel from a lot of what you see within Seattle City Limits okay I'm gonna get to the really good part of this which is what makes changing a strobe like this so hard in the first place but also how advocacy politics and funding seem to finally be coalescing around a vision for a safer more livable Street first though quick reminder to drop a like on the video and subscribe if you're enjoying and if you like seeing me get out to different cities and covering what makes them unique the patreon is great for that sub count check the channel now has enough subscribers to fill Old Trafford home ground of Manchester United Once Upon a Time the most valuable sports brand on the planet and now I don't even think they're the most valuable in their own City kind of a disaster okay let's get into a bit of theory it's no accident that the storage I've covered on this channel Charleston Boulevard and Saint Rose Parkway in the Las Vegas Valley and now Aurora Avenue in Seattle are all current or former State highways these are all roadways that were designed and built long ago as high Mobility limited access corridors before the feds began to rule out the national interstate system in the Eisenhower era and often before cities began to urbanize around them in our defense we just didn't know better a street like Aurora developed over time long before we had any sense that there should be a distinction between a limited access Highway and an urban Main Street and this is the thing even though the opening of I-5 in the 1960s should have enabled Aurora to take on a completely different function and urban character significant defending has never really been committed to actually retrofitting it appropriately it's expensive and politically difficult to transform this big of a facility in a wholesale way but this really comes back to the very definition of a Strode it was conceived and built as one thing and we've tried to shoehorn it into a completely different function even though the design is totally incompatible so what's different in 2022 well a lot of things say what you want about Vision zero but there's a lot more transparency and awareness about where crashes happen and who's getting injured and killed than there used to be I'm too lazy to do my own data analysis but this article in the urbanist highly recommended says that between 2015 and 2019 Aurora was the location of 17 of the traffic fatalities that took place in the entire city that is just mind-blowing we're also in a time where housing affordability in a city like Seattle is at crisis levels and a lot of advocacy has developed around fostering a safer more multimodal transportation system that can support the housing density we need Aurora has become a bit of a Bellwether for that discussion enter the Aurora reimagined Coalition which has brought together a variety of community groups that are advocating for a safer and more livable Aurora Avenue the Coalition has really helped build awareness and support for changes on Aurora and I do love the branding they've come up with although to be fair this probably underestimates the actual number of problems on Aurora by at least an order of magnitude I do encourage you to check out their website which I'll link in the description if you live in the Seattle area consider getting involved and if you live somewhere else take a look and think about what you might be able to take away as far as building local capacity to reimagine strodes in your own City anyway when you build community support for something that does often go hand in hand with at least some level of agency action and my understanding is there's around three million bugs for a planning effort around Aurora that's currently underway and I know what you're thinking it's a planning study cities do plans all the time and then they go on a shelf and they collect dust well meet state senator Reuben Carlisle D Seattle not to go great man theory on this but Senator Carlisle really spearheaded getting a 50 million dollar item in the state legislatures move ahead Washington Transportation package that's earmarked specifically for Aurora improvements my understanding is instead of peanut buttering the funding all up and down the corridor making spot improvements they're going to focus the Investments on the lichten Springs segment between 90th and 105th so that they can really demonstrate a transformative vision of what the street could and should be and build support for Investments that are needed all the way from the city limits down to the tunnel portal near Seattle Center none of this is easy there are some businesses that like Aurora just the way it is but things change at the south end of my study area you can turn off Aurora down to the new protected two-way bike route on Green Lake Way for decades this was a curb diet or a door Zone bike lane situation but Seattle continues to evolve and there's just more political capacity to do better things now so what kind of changes are we going to see on Aurora this decade stay tuned but with well-organized community support and an elected official to Champion it there's now at least reason for cautious optimism maybe 50 million reasons that's all I got thanks for watching and thanks to the patrons for partially funding doing this expedition to the most scenic parts of North Seattle your support means a lot keep coming at me with great topic suggestions I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 211,448

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, stroads, aurora avenue, green lake, wsdot, chick-fil-a, seattle worlds fair 1962

Id: iIeWLDwnOXM

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022