The 2011 paving season continues with the final Linden Ave N complete streets project open house next week. The project would create a two-way cycle track on Linden Ave N that would connect the Interurban Trail to Seattle’s north border and the start of Shoreline’s stretch of the Interurban.
Crews are already out spray painting and taking soil samples to ready the project. While only about 2,000 vehicles use the road each day, it is uncontrolled, wide and sections have no sidewalks. The stretch passes Bitter Lake, the community center, housing developments and senior housing. It connects many residential buildings to the grocery store.
The open house will be a chance to check out and comment on the final plans.
If you haven’t already seen them, you soon will see crews from telephone and other private utility companies on Linden Ave N locating (making paint marks on the ground or pavement) to indicate the location of where many of the underground utilities are buried. This step is necessary so that the engineers can add these details to the design plans as they work towards developing more detailed construction documents for the street redevelopment.In addition to locating underground utilities, you will see crews taking a limited number of soil samples, and survey crews out gathering additional information, as well as private utility companies (like cable) digging and then refilling small holes (pot holing) as they work to determine the depth of their cables. All this is good news.
Save This Date: April 6, 2011, 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM.
Our next project event will be our final Design Open House which is scheduled for April 6, 2011 at the Bitter Lake Community Center, 13035 Linden Avenue North, from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM.
The Open House will provide an update on the design effort and allow the community to review and comment on the design plans.
Comments
6 responses to “Final Linden Ave N open house April 6”
I ride this road regularly. Glad to see this moving forward. Thanks for the update and heads-up about the meeting.
This short stretch of road is like the wild west and will be great when finished.
I really hope cyclist enjoy and appreciate this missing link when its completed. As most of you are just passing through and just see it as a cruddy stretch of road with tons of parked cars, loose gravel and the occasional elderly obstacle. The people that live here are giving up a ton of parking so a few cyclists can have a safe and pretty ride.
Many of those “elderly obstacles” have been asking the city for sidewalks on this street for years. While the trail extension is certainly exciting for cyclists passing through, the added sidewalks will make life far easier for the many area residents who cannot drive a car to get to the grocery store or run other errands. The mayor highlighted one of them in his state of the city address:
That is the philosophy behind our Walk, Bike, Ride initiative. Better transportation is for everyone.
One of my favorite examples comes from the Bitter Lake neighborhood. Along Linden Avenue, just north of 130th Street, there are about 1,000 seniors who live in apartment buildings and condos. It’s one of the densest parts of the North End. And for many years, they didn’t have any sidewalks.
A team of people was determined to do something about it. One of them, Richard Dyksterhuis, is here today. A retired teacher, he fought for years to get the City to fix Linden Avenue and provide sidewalks, bike lanes, and create a safe street for all its users. He rallied his community behind his vision of “a world with sidewalks and neighbors who smile at you, who know you by name, who like you.”
Their efforts paid off. In the 2011 budget, we were able to fund the entire 17 block Linden Avenue complete streets project. We break ground in October, and will finish in 2012. Thank you, Richard, for your hard work and your persistence and all those who worked with you. If you go up to Linden Avenue, he’ll give you a tour – he calls it the Lindy Hop.
Having lived here quite some time I know exactly what they are striving for. However most of the 1000 residents live right at the crosswalk with a traffic signal that goes directly to the shopping area. I have yet to see an incident there besides cyclist blowing through the red light and almost striking elderly.
The area which actually has the most problems is the corner of 130th and linden which is receiving very little treatments due to the fact it has good markings and new sidewalks from new construction and the community center. This year alone there have been 3 elderly pedestrians hit by all things BUSSES! For some reason they are compelled to cross Linden right in the middle between 130th and the entrance of linden place where there are no crosswalks and none are being added on the latest revision of the plan. Hopefully the landscaping is dense enough and the bus stop moves to force them to go to a crosswalk area. All in all the improvements are going to be a good addition to the street and Im excited to see everything get cleaned up and the campers off the streets and the careless cyclist that have no regard for cars or peds coming out of driveways moved to the less busy side of the street.
The cycling community has fought hard and received pretty much every demand they wanted for this project under the guise of making it elderly friendly with sidewalks in areas that really don’t have problems to speak of.
Even though Linden residents were invited to the meetings people on off streets were not as informed so they will have a nice surprise in 2012 when the side streets start filling up and they cant park in front of their own houses.
I guess it works out good since there will be nice bike lanes so they can all ride to their cars 4 blocks away.
We just moved into the Tressa complex at the corner of Linden and 143rd. I definitely don’t fall into the category of “elderly”, but I personally am very grateful to see a good bike lane and nice, wide sidewalks going in. In addition to providing some entertainment for my construction-happy 4-yr-old, it’s going to make getting from our apartment down to the Bitter Lake Community Center a lot easier with him and his sister in a stroller.
I recently walked from Meridian to Linden on 145th and was appalled at what they have the gall to call a “sidewalk” along that street (basically some asphalt haphazardly strewn through people’s front yards right along the curb). I wish the city would add some decent sidewalks along all the major streets!
Note: I’m definitely biased towards sidewalks – we choose not to own a car (sold it before moving here from out of state), so parking isn’t an issue for us, but we made that choice because of Seattle’s bus system, and the impression that pedestrians and bikers have a reasonable expectation of respect from cars (as opposed to almost every other city I’ve lived in, where if you’re walking in a crosswalk when a car tries to turn right on red, you have a pretty good chance of getting honked at, if not hit, regardless of who has the right of way).
I’m sorry to hear that impression was not entirely accurate, if parking is taking precedence over decent sidewalks along what is, since I’ve lived here, a rather busy street for walkers and bikers.