Giving everyone a sidewalk is no walk in the park
Jim Portillo walks in the roadway, just a few feet from passing cars, because there are no sidewalks along his Greenwood street. Portillo, 31, is blind.
Sweeping the area ahead left to right with a white cane, he avoids the roadway's gravel shoulder — if it exists at all — because ditches or parked cars frequently interrupt the path.
He shrugs and says he's been dealing with the danger for five years.
"There's not a lot of room between me and traffic," he says. "Every now and then you wonder about some drivers."
Forty percent of Seattle streets lack full sidewalks on both sides of the road — totaling 650 miles, the city estimates — but installing them is a staggering expense of about $2 million per mile. It's not just the cost of the pavement: When a curb is built, it changes the flow of surface water, triggering legal requirements for drainage systems, which in turn can involve buying adjacent property. Many cities can build them only as part of a major street-paving project.
But residents are demanding sidewalks, and cities and counties are looking for ways to pay for them. Olympia turned to utility bills. Bellevue taps its capital budget. And King County spends about $1 million a year out of its roads fund. Snohomish County has committed $2 million annually to sidewalks and roads.
For the first time, Seattle has devoted money just for building new sidewalks — enough to install less than a mile a year citywide. Over the next nine years, taxpayers will foot the bill through a levy approved last year.
Next month, the city's transportation department is holding open houses to ask residents to rank proposed sidewalks, traffic signals and other suggestions it received this summer by the hundreds.
The department will use those comments to determine which big projects to tackle out of a $1.5 million annual pot. The city's 13 district councils get to split an additional $1.2 million a year for small projects, which frustrates neighborhood activists who want a say in how all the money gets spent.
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Giving everyone a sidewalk is no walk in the park
