This story was originally published in the Bellevue East Tom-Tom student newspaper and is reprinted here with permission.
by Charlotte Palm, Tom Tom Editor In Chief
Bellevue is implementing an Active Mobility Plan, which will incorporate community feedback to improve pedestrian travel and safety.
Active mobility includes any methods of transportation that are non-motorized, being either human powered or electric-assisted forms of transportation. Examples of this include walking, skating, and running. The City of Bellevue is implementing a plan relating to active mobility to help connect Bellevue more and make travel safer for everyone, not because of one specific incident, but for general safety.
“I’m not sure there is any one specific event to point to such as a traffic issue/accident etc. in Bellevue itself,” Technical Advisory Committee member Leland Jacobson said. “In our metro area there are increases in non-motor vehicle injuries and fatalities…the statistics increase is disconcerting to say the least and needs addressing.”
Many different individuals and departments have partnered together to work on this plan. The City of Bellevue has planning staff and engineers working on the plan, and other companies like Benesch, an engineering firm, are working with the city to help implement the plan. One other group working on the project is the Technical Advisory Committee, which Jacobson is a part of, that is made up of people with expertise on infrastructure and technical history of Bellevue.
“The committee’s role is to bring all this together with their local knowledge to aid in the creation of a plan that works,” Jacobson said. “The committee is a sounding board, if you will, for the overall team. Another important function is to help get the word out to residents about the plan and how residents can provide input.”
Residents can provide input to help the city with the plan by responding to a survey, which has been advertised throughout the city. The survey closes at the end of October, and community input is important because of the safety factors the plan hopes to address.
“For this project, we spent some time driving around Bellevue looking for things,” Craig Mielke, Senior Project Manager at Benesch, said. “And it was amazing to me how many times just randomly we would see people in very unsafe, compromising positions in Bellevue, apparently just trying to get around doing their normal life.”
There are many students who walk or get to school in other ways than cars or buses. Some students notice that there are problems with their current route, which could be fixed with the new plan.
“The sidewalks will rise up all of a sudden in just random places and you can’t really see it until you’re going over it and then you fly over the handlebars,” sophomore Lydia Taylor said.
The plan will use the results from the public’s survey to help improve things around the city such as sidewalks and street crossings. Something else that can cause challenges for residents is when developers construct new developments. Mielke says that people may live close to these new developments, but many times the developer didn’t take the neighborhoods into consideration and the neighborhoods didn’t anticipate a development someday, creating issues for people who want to go to the new businesses.
“There’s kind of a disjointed approach to how those things are connected,” Mielke said, “and so I think the city is really looking at ways to improve those connections for residents.”
After the survey and planning phase is over, the city will map out five to ten different projects related to active mobility. Some of the projects might be quick fixes, while others will take more time.
“[It] could be projects that are either quick build-projects that don’t cost a lot of money,” Mielke said. “But there might be other projects. There might be projects that are larger, more expensive, [and that] need more coordination.
And so what we want to do is, we…take that group of five to ten projects and really set the city up so that they have the tools to implement them quickly.”
Anyone who works, lives, or travels around Bellevue, including students, is encouraged to answer the survey questions for the active mobility plan. Students have a perspective that the Active Mobility Plan partners are interested in because students often get around in different ways than adults do.
“[This is important] because it makes it easier to get to school and takes less time to get to school and it’s safer,” Taylor said.
