Cascadia Prospectus

Deb Hubsmith and Andy Peri, both of the Marin County Bicycle Coalition.

The Cascadia Center for Regional Development (Discovery Institute's transportation center) yesterday hosted two events -- a corridor tour and a dinner policy discussion -- focused on the future of the rail and trail corridor on Seattle's Eastside.

As 2009 closed, the Port of Seattle and BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) reached an agreement that allows the 42-mile corridor running from Renton, Wash., in the south to Snohomish, Wash., in the north to remain intact. Under the end-of-year agreement, King County, Sound Transit, the City of Redmond, Puget Sound Energy, and the Cascade Water Alliance will purchase segments of the corridor.

It has long been Cascadia Center's view that the Eastside corridor can accommodate a trail and commuter rail. The purchase agreement represents an unprecedented opportunity for the future development of transportation in the corridor -- a corridor that once operational could serve as an example of smart and sustainable growth with opportunities for transit oriented development at station sites.

This issue -- and especially lessons that Seattle's Eastside can learn from those in Sonoma-Marin (Calif.) who navigated a similar opportunity in their backyard -- was the focus of discussion for most of the day on Wednesday for a group of local leaders and concerned citizens attending two Cascadia Center-sponsored events. From 3:00-6:00 p.m., a group of 45 people packed a tour bus to examine first-hand the corridor, going as far north as Woodinville and making stops along the way to see what the corridor looks like and envisioning what the future could hold for sustainable growth along a fully functioning rail and trail corridor.

After the corridor tour, from 6:00-9:00 p.m., in a dinner program held at the Bellevue Club in downtown Bellevue, Wash., a packed room heard from Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl, and absorbed critical "lessons learned" presentations from Andy Peri and Deb Hubsmith of the Marin County Bicycle Coalition. Both Mr. Peri and Ms. Hubsmith were for years intricately involved with the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) train and pathway process in California. (SMART will bring passenger train service to Marin and Sonoma Counties plus a 70-mile bicycle and pedestrian pathway/route that will run from Larkspur to Cloverdale.) Mr. Peri had a leadership role in running the grassroots election campaigns in 2006 and 2008, which was victorious in Nov. 2008. Ms. Hubsmith worked for more than a decade on the development and campaign for the SMART train and pathway, which was approved by 69.5 percent of voters as Measure Q in Nov. 2008; $91 million was included in Measure Q for a 70 mile bikeway parallel to the train.

The day closed with a community response panel, on which Chuck Ayres of the Cascade Bicycle Club, seemed to sum up the mood of cooperation that everyone -- despite ongoing, legitimate differences in viewpoint and approach -- is seeking when he indicated that although there are many, many details to continue to be weighed, ultimately he is in favor of rail with trail. It's a worthy goal, and the one that Cascadia Center, and many others, hopes gets one notch closer to reality as all of the diverse groups involved in making the decision continue to reach for a consensus.

Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute's Bruce Agnew recently became the chair a NAFTA-chartered commission focused on the issue of sustainable freight transportation.

The Secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) has embarked on new study to evaluate opportunities making freight transportation more sustainable in North America. Bruce Agnew, Executive Director of the Cascadia Trade Corridor, discusses the role of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation in evaluating opportunities for making freight transportation more sustainable in North America.

The commission is nearing the completion of a report that will be shared with Trade and Environmental Ministers prior to the G-20 session in the summer. Agnew recently attended a working session for the group in Mexico. (Above, in his own words.)

High above the Seattle early evening skyline on Thursday, at the Harbor Club on Second Ave., a group of citizens and leaders concerned about the future of Seattle's waterfront gathered to hear about lessons in waterfront revivalism and sustainability from their City of Brotherly Love brethren. The discussion, organized by Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center, focused on what Seattle can learn (and potentially apply) from a process that the historic city of Philadelphia went through over the last several years to reclaim its waterfront along its equally historic Delaware River.

Seattle's waterfront, with its magnificent vistas of mountains, islands and the Puget Sound, is arguably the grandest in all of the United States. It is home to marinas, the port, restaurants and shops. Amidst discussion of replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the seawall, however, a uniting geographical coordinate on the map has sometimes become a divisive point of debate. Underlying that debate, of course, is concern -- ultimately it is concern about the best steps the Emerald City can take to maintain and improve this most valuable of natural assets in a way that embraces the future while also respecting the past.

This set of circumstances -- uniting a city behind a collective civic vision for the long term sustainability of a waterfront -- is one that is most certainly not unique to Seattle. And in the case of Philadelphia, after several ill-fated attempts over the years to tackle its waterfront challenge, success only came through a civic-driven process, characterized by openness, transparency and integrity.

"HOW DO YOU CONNECT THE WATERFRONT BACK TO THE CITY?"

In the Fall of 2006, then-mayor of Philadelphia, John Street, authorized via executive order PennPraxis to develop and lead a publicly focused planning process for the city's central Delaware riverfront.

"The central Delaware (in Philadelphia) had become a landscape of big box stores and gated communities," Harris Steinberg, executive director of PennPraxis, told the assembled crowd at the Harbor Club discussion on Thursday. "It wasn't living up to its promise."

PennPraxis is headquartered out of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, and according to its Web site, is a "vehicle for carrying out practical or applied projects for external clients." It is difficult to get more practical and applied than confronting a major project that is at the center of a city's soul.

"The question we had before us was, 'How do you connect the waterfront back to the city?'" said Steinberg. He said it was a grim situation, as the central waterfront was "disconnected, under threat and under seige."

In a paper he wrote about the project, he describes the waterfront in question as "an 1146-acre post-industrial landscape that had been undergoing slow and unplanned change over the past 50-years...a federal highway built in the 1970s and 1980s severed the area from the dense residential neighborhoods adjacent to the river, creating difficult public access to the waterfront." The city "began calling for a plan that would guide development for the central Delaware," Steinberg wrote, and "PennPraxis, with the support of the William Penn Foundation, was invited to lead the effort." PennPraxis, he told the Seattle gathering, was approached in part because "no one really trusted the planning commission."

Listening to Steinberg, who comes across as sincere, informed and likable, it seems like he was made for the job. Indeed, to hear him describe the mood of distrust that permeated the very idea of revitalizing the seven-mile area, and the context of the city's earlier failed attempts, you'd be excused if you chalked his success up to the great man theory. But Steinberg -- and the facts -- would disagree with you.

Ultimately, as described to the group assembled in Seattle and in his paper, the successful 13-month process (Oct. 2006-Nov. 2007) "engaged more than 4000 Philadelphians in the creation of A Civic Vision for the Central Delaware." He describes it as "one of the largest public planning processes in Philadelphia's history with respect to the extent of citizen involvement." Critical, too, he says was the role of the press in engaging the process and ensuring a transparency to it. PennPraxis worked closely with local media (especially the editorial board of The Philadelphia Daily News). Additionally, PennPraxis created a news site -- PlanPhilly -- to cover the entire visioning process including public meetings and events. PlanPhilly, he says, essentially created a reporting beat (in the form of a news site) exclusively devoted to covering the issue.

"TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY AND INTEGRITY"

The lessons articulated in the Civic Vision for the Central Delaware are founded on an open, civic-driven process characterized by transparency and integrity.

The first set of lessons begins with having a respected, unbiased team with responsibility for the project. In the case of Philadelphia, for example, PennPraxis and the William Penn Foundation wouldn't take the project unless it met these criteria: citizen-driven; open and transparent; having involvement of the press; and, that recommendations created by the process and the implementation of those "would be accountable to the public voice that created the plan." The second set of lessons revolves around creating values and principles deriving from the citizens involved in the process. For Philadelphia, agreed-to values revolved around safety, culture, the environment, the economy and history. The principles established included: reconnecting with the water, honoring the river, designing with nature in mind, and protecting the public good.

"At the central section of the project area, cover, sink or remove the interstate in order to reconnect the city with the river."

Another important lesson is that design ideas were tethered to values and principles. Only after values and principles were created, for example, did the process in Philadelphia move to the design-recommendation stage. And even once there, the five design teams were "to respect the civic planning principles." According to Steinberg, that level of consistency and commitment eventually yielded several concrete ideas for the central Delaware, including integration of the "industrial past into the public open space system," designing the waterfront to allow for "a wide mix of uses," and "at the central section of the project area, cover, sink or remove the interstate in order to reconnect the city with the river."

Seattle isn't Philadelphia, and a river isn't a bay. But as was clear in listening to Steinberg and his colleagues, despite the two cities' differences, both benefit from a fundamental strength: an ingrained civic-mindedness. So, even though Seattle isn't done with its process, there are many lessons that PennPraxis and Philadelphia have to teach. Maybe the most important one? None of this has to take forever: Once the momentum was there, it only took Philadelphia 13 months to create, organize and implement a plan for its valued, historic waterfront.

Today marks the beginning of the 2010 Winter Olympics. These Olympic games, although taking place north of the U.S. border in Canada, are in many ways a regional event.

The magazine, BC Business, reported an extensive feature article, which included an interview with Bruce Agnew, director of Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center, on the Cascadia region and how the Winter Olympic Games plays into the fabric of this unique corner of the world. It's worth a read.

A winter storm pounds the SR 520 Bridge, driving waves over the roadway.
Photo Source: Washington State Department of Transportation

In what has been reported by The Seattle P-I as "an unusually high-profile political move," Microsoft Corp., yesterday told regional leaders that it's time to take action on replacing the 520 bridge over Lake Washington. With a full-page advertisement placed in The Seattle Times, the software giant dove into local political waters, creating waves almost as choppy as the real ones sometimes whipped up alongside the 47-year-old bridge. From the advertisement:

While there are still some final design issues that need to be resolved with the City of Seattle, we should not let last-minute objections undermine the hard-won agreements already in place for the rest of the project. Doing so would cause yet more delay, increase the cost to taxpayers, and put this vital transportation and economic corridor at risk.

As reported in the P-I, at a news conference on Tuesday, Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith said the time for discussion was over and that a plan called A+ (Washington State's plan that calls for a six-lane structure that includes HOV lanes) "is the kind of plan that should move forward." Microsoft's public call for action comes on the heels of an early February move by Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and several state lawmakers to get traction for a rebuilt 520 bridge that, according to the P-I, "would dedicate lanes to only buses and light rail." Such a plan would likely present a problem for the Redmond-based Microsoft, which says 5,000 of its employees -- 4,200 using the company's proprietary Connector shuttle -- cross the bridge each day.

Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute's Bruce Agnew (who has written extensively about solutions to the region's transportation challenges, including this Seattle Times op-ed highlighting the innovative Connector bus), told the P-I in a separate story yesterday that "McGinn's proposal would undo 20 years of regional planning and investment in company van pools and HOV lanes as a way to reduce the number of cars on the road." More Agnew:

"The Microsoft Connector is fabulously successful," Agnew said. "It supplements Metro bus service and it's a green option for thousands of Microsoft employees. So the mayor's policy is that we're not going to allow the Connector in bus lanes because it's not a real bus? I'm glad Microsoft is speaking out."

It's taken over one decade to reach "an agreed-upon design and funding plan for a new bridge," according to Microsoft's full-page advertisement. And though some officials are concerned about the company's call to action -- Washington state senator Ed Murray was quoted in the P-I saying the announcement equated to a "punch in the face" -- Cascadia Center's Agnew says Microsoft should let its voice be known. "Microsoft is speaking up when other regional leaders should be," he said.