The folks involved in the Wallingford Greenway project will be meeting next Wednesday, October 12, from 6:30-8:30pm at Mosaic Den (4401 2nd Avenue NE). It’s open to the public and it’s a dinner potluck so bring something to share and help the group plan beyond the East-West segment that will be completed this year. Cathy “Greenway” Tuttle explains the meeting’s agenda:
We need to plan a complete Wallingford Greenway network beyond the one mile East-West segment that will be completed this year. There will likely be funding to make this complete network if we agree soon on where greenways need to go in our neighborhood.
It shouldn’t take us too long to decide where we want our routes to go, but we do need consensus. We should have at least two North-South routes (Sunnyside? Densmore? Midvale? Woodlawn?), and at least one other East-West route. We’ll need to decide as a community which places are significant and routes that are going to work best for us — for our kids going to school, our seniors, dog walkers, bikers, drivers, transit, public safety vehicles, business vehicles, delivery trucks, shoppers, and so on.
Wallingford Greenways has also formed a public group on Google. Click here if you’d like to join.
I’m an avid biker, but this project has always seemed odd to me. It seems to start and end at non-existent or expensive biking no-man’s-land. Yes, it would be great to have a bike pedestrian overpass across I-5 and it would be great to connect across to Fremont at the Aurora pedestrian overpass, but these are really expensive options and not very likely to happen. The routing at the west end also seems a bit odd, choosing to navigate one of the steepest hills in Wallingford at 43rd and Stone Way.
Yes, it will be good to have a safer biking path in Wallingford. I would prefer to see pedestrians, shoppers, etc travel 45th, however, and patronize our strugging neighborhood business community.
Has this project been well vetted through a community process? Perhaps I have been snoozing (I don’t think so), but have there been public design meetings?