Five questions for Kirkland Mayor Amy Walen

What is the city of Kirkland doing to accommodate bicycling and walking? What are some of your bike/ped safety priorities this year?

It’s been a busy year. We finished adding 19 new flashing beacons at crosswalks and our resurfacing projects are adding new or wider bike lanes on all newly resurfaced streets. We’ll also be wrapping up the interim trail on the Cross Kirkland Corridor. The city manager’s proposed 2015-16 budget includes a “Walkable Kirkland” initiative that dedicates an additional $2.4 million to flashing beacons, crosswalks, sidewalks and school walk routes in the next five years.

We’ve been doing a lot of planning! Council approved a master plan for the Cross Kirkland Corridor and the Juanita Drive Corridor Study. We’ve also been setting the foundation for our revised Comprehensive Plan, notably with the Transportation Master Plan that covers bike and pedestrian policy. We’ll complete the 100th Avenue Corridor Study this year; one of the main focuses of that study was completing bicycle and pedestrian facilities.

How will Kirkland's upcoming updates to the Transportation Master Plan change the city in the years ahead?

It will be transformative. The goals and policies embrace walking, biking and transit. There’s a big emphasis on safety, on completing networks for bikes and on building sidewalks where they can increase and support walkable neighborhoods.

The centerpiece of the safety strategy is a “vision zero” multidisciplinary approach to eliminating crashes. We also know that building great facilities for bikes means more ridership and more ridership improves safety for all modes.

We are incorporating a network of greenways to compliment more traditional facilities. Kirkland of the future will have better wayfinding and better bike parking, too.

What are the biggest challenges Kirkland faces in terms of improving bicycling infrastructure?

As you might expect, funding is a big challenge. We’re committed to a balanced approach that means we can’t turn our backs on sidewalks, better crosswalks, transit facilities and projects that help cars. Kirkland isn’t different than any other city, there is never enough money to do everything people would like us to do.

The other challenge is moving forward at the right pace. For example, say we removed a bunch of heavily used parking and converted that street space to bike facilities. It might be great for cyclists, but there would likely be blow back that could jeopardize the ability to deliver future bike projects. So we need to move steadily and intentionally but at the right speed.

There has been a lot of buzz around protected bike lanes, both in the region and around the county, this past year. What do you think of protected bike lanes? Will we be seeing protected bike lanes in Kirkland in the future? 

Yes! Our Transportation Plan calls for protected bike lanes. We’re considering the whole spectrum, from a paint buffer of a couple of feet all the way up to something much more substantial. Lake Washington Boulevard has great potential; we’d like to study it more.

I do want to make sure that we don’t spend a disproportionate amount of resources building a short stretch of high-end protected bike lanes at the expense of more complete network. There’s a lot of buzz right now, in a couple of years there should be more experience with protected facilities and more best practices for us to draw on.

Many of our members/supporters are very excited about the Cross Kirkland Corridor. Thank you for your work on this transformative project. What do you think of the CKC? How do you think it will change Kirkland? 

The CKC will be a legacy project that will shape Kirkland for decades to come. Future generations will view it in the same way that we view the waterfront parks that the leaders before us gave the city. I am proud to have been part of acquiring the CKC. We’re planning for much more than a paved trail for bikes and pedestrians. As one of our citizens coined it, the CKC will be a place to go to not just go through. We’re already seeing that; Chainline Brewery is opening on the corridor and our interim trail isn’t even done. I hope people can check out the Master Plan that Council approved last June and get a sense of our vision.

The other big piece is integrating the CKC into the rest of the network, making it easy to get to the CKC – that’s almost as important as the corridor itself. It was important to us to get the corridor open and usable quickly. That’s why we’ve moved fast to buy our section, get the tracks out and a high quality crushed rock trail with improved street crossings in place.

It will be open in a couple of months, and I’d urge you to check it out. I think you’ll be surprised at how smooth it rides. We’re currently working with King County and Redmond on a connection between the CKC and the Redmond Central Connector. We have a grant to connect the CKC to the new transit-oriented development at the South Kirkland Park and Ride which is also adjacent to the SR 520 trail; this will make for seamless connections. It’s exciting to imagine the day when our partners to the north and south get their pieces of the trail completed and open up even more of the Eastside.

Who would you like to hear from next? Let us know by emailing McKayla at mckaylad@cascade.org. ​