McGilvra crossing gets top priority from district council

The East District Neighborhood Council has recommended funding for improvements to the intersection of East Madison Street and East McGilvra Boulevard — and made it a top priority.

On July 11, the council ranked the top three projects vying for just $90,000 available through the city’s Neighborhood Park and Street Fund. 

All three projects were scored in order to help the Seattle Department of Transportation as they cull the few that will receive funding in the city’s 2017 budget.

However, all three projects addressed real traffic issues, council Chair Lindy Wishard said.

The Madison Park Community Council has been pushing for traffic improvements at the intersection of East Madison Street and East McGilvra Boulevard since 2013, when resident Dan Miller was struck and critically injured at a crosswalk; another pedestrian sustained multiple injuries during the August 2013 collision.

The Department of Transporation has the design at the ready and $300,000 committed to the improvement of the intersection with an enhanced crosswalk, extending curb lines and adding missing ramps under the American Disability Act. Installation was delayed until 2017.

Without $90,000 in overrun protection the $300,000 in matching grants from the Safe Routes to School and Pedestrian Master Plan would expire next year, said Madison Park Community Councilmember Alice Lanczos.

“We need one more approval,” Lanczos told the East District Neighborhood Council. “If we don’t get one more approval, the whole thing goes to pieces.”

Community council member Bob Edmiston, who is also a user experience engineer at Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, busted out the data collected by Greenways at the Madison/McGilvra crosswalk.

Because the crosswork is a popular — though not well-liked — route for students and their parents to walk to McGilvra Elementary on the west side of Madison, Greenways monitored for gaps in traffic, including wait times to cross.

The 45-foot distance from one side to the other had just two gaps in traffic lasting more than 19 seconds between 8-8:15 a.m. Older students run to beat cars across, Edmiston said.

“They’re playing ‘Frogger,’” he said. Parents with younger children have to wait for brief traffic gaps to cross.

With only $90,000 allotted for each district through the Neighborhood Park and Street Fund, Wishard said she wondered if the overrun funding the Community Council was requesting could be put in escrow, so that any leftover funding could be transferred to one of the other projects after the Madison/McGilvra improvements were made.

East District coordinator Tim Durkan said the Department of Neighborhoods, which manages the Neighborhood Park and Street Funds, checks in around November and fine-tunes prioritized projects and cost estimates in December. Typically, with any unused funding — if only $85,000 of the $90,000 total was needed, for example — district representatives typically jump in and try to appropriate it for their projects.

“It’s kind of a horse trading thing,” Durkan explained, adding there’s no way of knowing at this time if the city will experience another funding surplus with NPSF like it did last year.

Melrose Promenade

A past recipient of Department of Neighborhood funds to improve safety at Melrose Avenue, around the Pike/Pine corridor, the Melrose Promenade group made its case again Monday for $71,000 in Neighborhood Park and Street funding.

The group received $20,000 from the Department of Neighborhoods in 2012 for a community vision process around improving safety on the busy arterial and $50,000 from the city’s Large Project Grant for minor improvements, such as signage and a newly painted crosswalk at Melrose Avenue and Pike Street. A signaled crosswalk was installed on the west side of Pike at Melrose last year.

Mike Kent for the Melrose Promenade said the $71,000 funding request would be broken up for curb bulb extensions on Melrose and Minor avenues between Pike and Pine streets — most likely painted over actual concrete — new crosswalks across Melrose and Minor by Mamnoon and the Starbucks Reserve Roastery and new community crosswalks on the south leg of Melrose and Pine, Minor and Pine and the north leg of Melrose and Pike.

The community crosswalks would reflect the neighborhood, much like the rainbow crosswalks in the Pike/Pine corridor and Pan-African red, green and black colors in the Central District.

Kent said the Melrose Promenade has been a “seven-year project in the making,” anticipating an increase in pedestrian traffic around Melrose as the neighborhood redevelops.

“Guess what?,” he said. “[The traffic]’s here.There are a lot of people who want to be on Melrose.”

He said a community crosswalk at Melrose and Pike, where McMenamins Six Arms is located, is a very important portion of the project.

“It’s one of the most dangerous intersections in the neighborhood,” Kent said, “[The] most dangerous, maybe, in the city.”

The Melrose Promenade has also partnered with Mamnoon to create a “streatery” for the restaurant, which Kent said he’s hopeful will be completed soon.

Not a raised intersection

A project proposed through a partnership between the Capitol Hill Community Council and Central Seattle Greenways to slow traffic around the new light rail station with a raised intersection at 10th Avenue and East John Street was taken off the table after the Department of Transportation declared it infeasible. But the East District Council put support into alternatives proposed by the department.

Mike Archambault, the treasurer of the Capitol Hill council and a member of Central Seattle Greenways, said the project was proposed to help people cross East John on their way to the light rail station. Motorists on the street rarely yield for pedestrians and speed around traffic, taking advantage of the four-lane-wide two-lane street, Archambault said.

The Transportation Department nipped that project in the bud for a number of reasons, Archambault said, including the wear-and-tear a raised intersection would have on buses and emergency vehicles.

The Transportation Department provided around $88,000 is alternatives, such as a new marked crosswalk, painted or concrete curb bulbs and other traffic control improvements. Archambault said a good chunk of that price could be shaved by excluding rectangular rapid-flashing beacons at the crosswalk, which have not been effective in other parts of the city, with two on Lake City Way Northeast being exceptions.