Valley discusses fate of Sprague and Appleway

Spokane Valley’s love-hate relationship with the Sprague-Appleway couplet – and transportation in general along the city’s main drag – came to the fore Thursday night at the third community meeting on a plan to breathe new life into the tired commercial strip.

“Like it or not, it’s not just about moving cars,” said Troy Russ, one of several urban-design experts hired by the city to craft a redevelopment plan for Sprague and Appleway.

For years, business owners along the couplet have bemoaned the loss of business they attribute to lower traffic counts on Sprague during the evening commute.

Their comments and those of others who don’t like the way the street looks are being voiced in the context of dramatic changes proposed for Sprague, Appleway and the empty strip of right of way that would extend the couplet to the east.

Analysis by traffic experts shows that few people use the entire length of Sprague to commute in the morning and at night.

“This isn’t a through-trip corridor,” Russ said.

Instead, Sprague is more of a business corridor, he said. Consultants suggest that designing the road to best accommodate how it will be used in the future should consider not only cars but also transit, freight, bicycles and pedestrians.

Philosophies on street design left over from the 1950s channel most traffic onto large roads instead of connecting smaller ones. The problem, though, is that large roads become less efficient the more lanes they have, and accidents become more severe with increased speed, Russ said.

The road itself drastically affects what grows up around it, and consultants told the audience that creating an effective transportation system should be done in conjunction with planning for future land use.

After the consultants’ presentation, the 90 or so people gathered around several round tables and spent more than an hour discussing just that.

“It’s more about getting your ideas than anything else,” said Michael Freedman, the lead urban designer on the team of consultants.

They will consider all of the comments from Thursday’s meeting and present a more concrete transportation proposal for Sprague at the next public workshop.

Ideas at the tables sounded familiar: Businesses do better on two-way streets; the road is dangerous for pedestrians; the couplet can be confusing, and it has too few cross streets.

Picking from pictures around the room of what several sections of Sprague and Appleway could look like, most people chose images where streets were lined with trees, pedestrians had some distance between them, and the road and parking was kept out of sight.

Suggested improvements ranged from the aesthetic to the practical.

“In heavy winters you need to have a place to put the snow,” said Jennie Willardson, explaining part of her support for more space between traffic and sidewalks.

On the one-way versus two-way debate, most favored keeping Sprague two-way and making the extension of Appleway two-way also, from at least University east.

There was less consensus on the direction of the streets west of Dishman-Mica, with some preferring to keep it one-way and others wanting to make both Sprague and Appleway two-way streets throughout town.

The Sprague study includes land along both Appleway and the former Milwaukee Railroad right of way that will some day be used to extend Appleway east nearly to the city limits.

The future of that project has been up in the air since the county built the couplet in 2000.

After years of on-again, off-again talks on transferring the land from the county to the city, Mayor Diana Wilhite sent a letter to county officials two weeks ago stating that the city has owned it all along and demanding that the county acknowledge that.

As of Tuesday’s City Council meeting, the county had not yet responded.

Extending Appleway also has been delayed by environmental studies to determine whether the need for the new roadway justifies the project’s environmental impact and disputes over computer models of future traffic in the city.

The street design that affects the environmental study is now a part of the Sprague/Appleway planning process, and the city expects the project to move ahead as early as next year.

“Buildings are temporary; streets are not,” Russ said.

How Sprague and Appleway are designed and what type of future land use is allowed around them will ultimately be up to the City Council as it debates elements of the plan and how to implement them next year.

“It’s a lot of information we’ll have to assimilate,” Wilhite said of comments at the community meetings.