As Bellevue’s downtown continues to bustle and boom, so does the need to find safe ways for all forms of transportation to exist on the city’s crowded roadways.
The City Council considered a variety of transportation options Monday during a briefing about a plan to ensure that getting around Bellevue’s core is easy and safe for motorists, cyclists, transit riders and walkers.
The Downtown Transportation Plan, an update of the 2004 plan, which doesn’t take into account the future East Link light rail line and RapidRide buses, is intended to plot out needed facilities for all modes of getting around downtown between now and 2030. By 2030, employment downtown is projected to be 70,300, up from 42,525 in 2010, while the residential population is projected to reach 19,000 a 177 percent jump from the 2010 downtown population of 6,858.
Targeted for completion in 2013, the new plan could set the stage for projects as big as new highway overpasses and streets or as small as lane striping, traffic signal timing and crosswalks. An overpass at Northeast 10th Street for bikes and an added lane on Northeast Eighth Street between 106th and 108th avenues are examples of completed projects identified in the current downtown transportation plan.
The update focuses on four modes of transportation – bicycle, pedestrian, transit and roadway.
Staff and consultants have worked with the Transportation Commission on the bicycle section of the plan so far, and the council focused on that.
Possible bike facilities include east-west corridor improvements on Main and Northeast 12th streets and north-south corridor improvements on 100th, 108th and 112th avenues Northeast.
Councilmembers asked about ways to make conditions better for cyclists on 112th Avenue, which is part of the Lake Washington Loop route and a key bike commuter route. The intersection with Northeast Eighth Street, with many lanes of traffic in four directions and on- and off-ramps for Interstate 405, begs for some kind of improvement, councilmembers said.
Some ideas have been identified, including a dedicated bike lane or a bike-pedestrian overpass, but city staff members would like to receive more resident input would be helpful for developing a preference or finding new solutions.
