Spokane County unveils new Bigelow Gulch connector decades in the making

More than 20 years ago, Spokane County set forth with an ambitious plan to connect Spokane Valley and northern Spokane with a wider, safer and quicker thoroughfare.

After years of delays, a recession, five presidential administrations and more than a few shakeups on the Spokane County Commission, that goal was realized Tuesday as local leaders cut the ribbon on the completed Bigelow Gulch Urban Connector project.

Spokane County Commissioner Al French joked during the roadway’s formal ribbon cutting Tuesday that the project began when he first took office “in the 1800s” and said he was happy that it was finished before the North-South Freeway, another major road construction project decades in the making.

The decadeslong effort to improve Bigelow Gulch was first laid out in a comprehensive plan update in the late ’90s amid concerns about the aging roadway.

Traffic volumes along what was then a two-lane former farm road were increasing at an exponential rate as the route had become a favorite of truckers and commuters traveling between the Valley and north Spokane.

The increased traffic did more than change the character of the agricultural area – it also led to increased wear and tear and maintenance workloads for the county. Bigelow Gulch was not constructed to support the thousands of big rigs using the roadway to access U.S. Highway 2, Interstate 90 and the commercial and industrial properties in what is now Spokane Valley.

When construction began in 2005, county officials cited the danger of the road, with 500 accidents and at least six fatalities reported since 1994. As the project continued, lawsuits were filed, including one from residents challenging the environmental analysis completed on the project. Problems with how the county acquired right-of-way for the project cropped up in 2011, threatening to derail the project.

“We got through it,” French said.

U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers cited the extraordinary level of collaboration that led to the completion of the project.

“Today is very special,” she said. “Congratulations to Spokane County as the lead agency. This is an example of state, federal and local government working together.”

The county split the work of straightening and widening the roadway into nine phases, completing seven of them between 2005 and 2021. Tuesday’s event marked the completion of the final phase of the project that took out one of the last remaining twists in the once-winding road.

Crews worked throughout the summer to blast away a rocky hillside for the new alignment, construct more than 600 feet of deep culverts, lay a cement base and asphalt for the roadway, and install guardrails, signage and lighting. In September, the county commissioners enacted new names for roads affected by the project, with one large section renamed for a former county engineer.

The value of the straighter, wider Bigelow Gulch Road likely won’t be fully appreciated until the North Spokane Corridor is completed and the roadway is able to connect, providing easy freight traffic all around the region.

As various elected officials spoke Tuesday morning, a mix of passenger vehicles and commercial trucks hummed by. Traffic counts completed in the spring of this year showed average daily traffic of 21,429 vehicles traveling Bigelow to Argonne Road and 16,582 vehicles per day traveling Bigelow to Forker Road.

Still, an engineer’s analysis in 2020, later updated in 2022, found a litany of benefits to the now-completed 8-mile stretch.

Over the next 20 years, the improvements will reduce collisions by 29%, save local travelers and truckers around 5.4 million hours of travel time and reduce emissions by 30,987 tons, according to the report.