By Lee Bruch
This is the first entry in ARC’s blog, a continuing conversation to help us Reimagine Aurora.
Hopefully over time you and many others will contribute with imagination and engage in a lively exchange of a wide variety of thoughts about our region, its changes, how we get around, and about the Aurora Avenue Corridor.
Help Reimagine Aurora by sending your thoughts, ideas, and suggested blog posts to AuroraReimaginedCoalition@gmail.com and by contributing to discussions in our Google Group at https://groups.google.com/g/aurorareimaginedcoalition.
WHY? WHY NOW?
This graph from Vision 2050 by the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) sums it up:
Credit: from Puget Sound Regional Council, Vision 2050
By 2050, well within the lives of most of us, the population of the central Puget Sound region will be 45% larger than in 2017, roughly three times the population back in 1970!
Stop for a moment. Think about that. Imagine the implications.
Where will the people go? What will their daily lives look like?
Will we continue to sprawl across the surrounding countryside, replacing farms, forests, and wetlands with 1950’s style suburbia and its roads, forcing everyone to travel more and further distances? Or will we live denser to protect the environment that the pacific northwest touts?
Will our cities develop into 15 minute cities where most people can walk to their necessities and eliminate the need for many driving trips? Will we rely more on mass transit? Will we rely more on delivery services? Will we get around in ways we don’t yet imagine?
Do you think that traffic is bad now? Unless we change our current paradigm those cars will tie themselves in knots whether we like it or not.
Electric cars won’t help. Automated cars won’t help. They all take the same amount of space on our crowded streets. Cars-on-demand like Uber won’t help - each of those cars drives to pick us up, take us where we need to go, and then drives on to the next trip, increasing traffic by replacing one trip with three.
And what does climate change portend? How will it be affected by, and how will it affect, all of this?
How does Aurora Avenue fit into all of this? Should Aurora just respond after-the-fact to whatever happens? Or should the design of Aurora nudge the city to achieve a future it chooses?
Like the old conundrum about chickens and eggs, the nature and form of our cities and their transportation networks are inexorably linked.
It’s a time of change, big change. Our paradigms will change, whether we want them to or not.
CHANGE CONTINUALLY HAPPENS
Below is Greenwood Avenue at 85th Street in 1904. It’s a world of horses and of walking to what is nearby. What would someone at that time imagine Seattle would be like thirty years later?
Credit: University of Washington, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Below is Greenwood Avenue at 85th Street in 1921, only 17 years later.
It’s a world of streetcars allowing people to travel greater distances and expand Seattle … and the beginnings of the auto age and expansion into the surrounding lands.
Credit: Asahel Curtis, University of Washington, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Below is a map of Seattle in 1914, in the middle of a period of massive change and civic investment like the time we are living in.
Seattle’s population quadrupled from 80,671 in 1900 to 315,312 in 1920
The dark lines on the map are streetcar and interurban routes that allowed that expansion.
The ship canal was built between 1911 and 1917, 63 years after visionaries first imagined a canal between Puget Sound and Lake Washington.
The bridges shown in the 1914 map were later torn down and replaced: the current Fremont Bridge opened in 1917, the University Bridge opened in 1919. The Montlake Bridge didn’t open until 1925. The Stone Way Bridge was removed permanently.
Credit: Knoll Map Company from Wikimedia commons, public domain
Prior to the 1932 opening of the Aurora Bridge (George Washington Memorial Bridge), the “Aurora Speedway” through Woodland Park, and Aurora Avenue there were four primary ways to get from downtown Seattle to Everett:
Sail on a “Mosquito Fleet” steamship,
Ride the Seattle-Everett Interurban (then-and-now map here),
Drive through Lake City, Bothell, and Mill Creek on the old original Pacific Highway Route 1, (an annotated map here)
Or drive along Fremont, Phinney, and Greenwood Avenues to the North Trunk Road.
In their day the Aurora Bridge and Aurora Avenue both responded to the needs of the Motor Age and fueled it, fueled both the good and the bad of that age.
As usual, there is always resistance to change. It’s human nature. Some people envision a new future, others fight it. Throughout 1930 the Seattle Times campaigned hard against the Aurora Speedway. But that was in another age.
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Credit: Seattle Times, Nov. 2, 1930 from Seattle Times Archives
We’re now well into another century. We’re at the dawn of a new age with different needs.
HELP REIMAGINE & SHAPE AURORA’S FUTURE
Let’s follow in the footsteps of Thomas Mercer, one of Seattle’s pioneers who in 1854 imagined and began advocacy for a canal between Puget Sound and Lake Washington – 63 years before it came into fruition.
Let’s imagine the 21st Century and how Aurora Avenue can both respond to the new needs and help to encourage needed changes.
Help Reimagine Aurora by sending your thoughts, ideas, and suggested blog posts via email to AuroraReimaginedCoalition@gmail.com
and by contributing to discussions in our Google Group at https://groups.google.com/g/aurorareimaginedcoalition.
RESOURCES
To charge the imagination it helps to keep abreast of what other people are imagining and thinking.
A few of my favorite websites for cities and their transportation are:
At a national level:
https://nacto.org/ (Urban Land Institute)
https://nacto.org/ (National Association of City Transportation Officials)
In Seattle:
https://seattlegreenways.org/ (Seattle Neighborhood Greenways)
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/ (Traffic Lab)
https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/ (SDOT’s blog)
And a few of the people who I follow on Twitter are:
At the national level:
Brent Toderian @BrentToderian (one of the foremost planners)
Strong Towns @StrongTowns
Streetsblog USA @StreetsblogUSA
Streetfilms (Open Streets are Law in NYC!) @Streetfilms
In Seattle:
Dongho Chang @dongho_chang
Ryan Packer @typewriteralley
Pushing The Needle @pushtheneedle
Gordon Padelford (he/him) @GordonOfSeattle