The mayor’s office has organized several community engagement forums as part of the city’s Walk Bike Ride initiative. Walk Bike Ride is an initiative towards making it easier for people to get around Seattle without driving.
Last night, around 50 people gathered at REI’s flagship store in South Lake Union to design a better city for walking, biking, and riding transit.
The room had several informational displays, including basic facts and information about transit, bicycling, and walking, as well as displays showing a proposed redesign of Kinnear Park.
Representatives from the mayor’s office and King County spoke briefly about the Walk Bike Ride initiative and its goals.
In addition to residents from around the city, representatives from many local transportation-oriented groups were present, including Seattle Transit Blog, King County Metro, and SDOT.
There were several tables, each with its own map of a Seattle neighborhood, including First Hill, Pioneer Square, Downtown, and Capitol Hill. For most of the session, participants worked on redesigning their neighborhood to make it easier to get around by foot, bike, and transit. Ideas ranged from the cheap and easy (e.g. improving signal timing for pedestrians) to the more ambitious (e.g. building a pedestrian bridge over I-5).
People had a chance to see the ideas shared for all neighborhoods. At the end, the city took the results of these working sessions to incorporate in their planning as the city moves forward with this initiative.
