Building Transit into Suburban Communities – Newcastle, WA
Coal Creek Parkway Bridge over May Creek
Newcastle, WA, with a long and rich history as a coal mining town, was officially incorporated in 1994 and stayed as a new suburb between the more established cities of Renton and Bellevue. Its geography between two cities includes an important arterial, Coal Creek Parkway, which is a major arterial paralleling the Eastsides’ transportation backbone -Interstate 405.
Soon after incorporation, the City of Newcastle procured funding from the Transportation Improvement Board to complete widening of Coal Creek Parkway to add lanes, pedestrian and bike facilities and widen an existing arch bridge over the natural resource areas along May Creek. This significant arterial could have defined the City as a place to drive through rather than to had the City not used this opportunity to also use infrastructure to create their center. Infrastructure investment provides unique opportunity to create places for people to walk, and bike not just drive. In the case of Newcastle, the Coal Creek Parkway project provided opportunities to develop walkable and bike-able linkages between retail areas, the fresh produce market, parks and the City Hall. Additional investments by Sound Transit to create a transit center along Coal Creek Parkway, resulted in even greater synergy for pedestrians and bicyclists to access destinations without relying on automobiles. CH2M HILL designed Coal Creek Parkway and with LMN Architects designed the Newcastle Transit Center. Ribbon was cut for the transit center on June 16th, 2010.
More on the Coal Creek Parkway and pictures after the break.
- Photo by Kerry Sullivan
Unique design challenges, outstanding results with landscpaed medians and facilities for bikes and pedestrians, as well as innovations to minimize environmental impact have resulted in this project (Coal Creek Parkway Phase II) being awarded Washington APWA‘s 2010 project of the year in the $25-75 Million dollar Category. Come see once again the transformation of infrastructure investment in creating community.
This sounds like how city and infrastructure planing should be done. Instead of just adding more roads for cars, opportunity for public transportation and bicycles as well as pedestrians should be added.
We will have to become less reliant on driving in the future as oil prizes rise (although North Americans have cheep oil compared to Europe), so projects like these are great. Do you know if this will be held as an example for future planing, or if this is only a one time occurrence?
I have argued for better planing of public transits and bike lanes for a while now, on my company’s blog, at commutegreenerinfo.com. An important part of making people consider alternative modes of transportation is a well developed and maintained system of public transportation after all. Who want to have to risk life by cycling on streets with heavily traffic, or use an unreliable and dirty system of buses…
Thanks for your comment. This was a nice opportunity to develop projects concurrently.