Spokane Transit is inching closer to securing some of the money it needs for its Division Street Bus Rapid Transit project.
Chief Executive Karl Otterstrom says a federal agency has assigned the project a “medium high” rating. That means Spokane Transit is now virtually guaranteed to collect an $82 million grant, perhaps within a few months. Agency officials are doing the work needed to finish the application process.
Otterstrom says, assuming all goes as planned, Spokane Transit plans to begin work in 2028 to improve the conditions for bus and vehicle travel on North Division.
This interview edited for length and clarity.
DN: Spokane is scheduled to receive $82 millon. How do you spend $82 million on this project?
Karl Otterstrom: This project, overall, has a cost estimate of $166 million. That includes $82 million in federal funds, $45 million in state funds, originally programmed and then later committed by the state a few years ago, and then approximately $38 million in local funds that are already in our capital program. There's no debt that will be incurred as part of this project.
Those funds go towards not just the buses for the corridor, we are planning for battery electric buses, like on the City Lane Bus Rapid Transit project, also the stations along the corridor. There's intersections and locations where we're actually upgrading the signal systems, changing the lanes to accommodate the bus stops, and then putting in real-time information signs.
We also have plans for something called business access and transit lanes. These are lanes, basically taking the outside lanes of the corridor, either on the left side or right side, depending on which stretch, and designating them for turning movements into businesses and to side streets, as well as transit. What that does, it really organizes traffic. So people who want to continue through, they're not stuck behind a bus. Those people who are making turns, there are fewer of them, and so the bus is able to operate through the corridor more reliably, coupled with transit signal priority. So that is upgrading the signal systems or incorporating a system to understand where the bus is, and based on parameters we work with the City of Spokane on, those parameters decide whether the light turns green a little early for the bus to come through or has held a little longer to get that bus through the light before it turns red, and those can also improve the reliability and consistency of the bus.
So overall, those improvements increase both the capacity of the buses, the system, and the quality of service. All that infrastructure is quite expensive when you add it all together, but luckily we're looking at, you know, over 70% of the costs being funded by the state and federal government.
DN: The goal is to make travel on Division more efficient, not just for the buses, but also for cars, is that correct?
KO: So the overall corridor becomes more high-performing for everybody. With cars in particular, we are looking at how does the level of service change with this project, and generally what systems have found with BAT lanes, because they are rationalizing or organizing the traffic, the through traffic actually performs better.
DN: We saw that North Monroe has been narrowed from two lanes each way to one. Will Division be somewhat like that, or will it be sort of a different look, a hybrid look?
KO: The overall project that is federally funded is what we call phase one of the corridor. Future phases of this project would come after the completion of the North Spokane Corridor, and one of those elements is a bicycle facility on Ruby Street. That design has not been finalized yet, but one scenario for the design is actually reducing the number of lanes and putting the bicycle facility or what they call a two-way cycle track in that displaced lane, so it reduces the crossing distance for pedestrians. So that is a future phase.
Now, as part of the main project, we won't see real substantive changes to the curb lines, but we will have more pedestrian amenities. So let's say at Boone Avenue, there is a light that gets pedestrians across from Gonzaga to in between Ruby and Division, but there's no corresponding pedestrian light to get people across Division, so they can go to the One Spokane Stadium or a hockey game or whatever, so we will be investing in that crossing as part of this project.
There are other examples of that up and down the corridor where we're improving the pedestrian environment, but still retaining the same curb line so it's not like Monroe in the sense that the road narrows in width.
DN: The goal is to run more buses more frequently up and down Division?
KO: Yeah. Initially, we are planning the buses to come every 15 minutes, which is similar to today, but extending that into later in the evening and on Saturdays, more of the day.
Longer term, the vision is to increase that to every 10 minutes for most of the day, and then extend that up to a…STA has purchased property near Mead Works as a future extension and really create a hub up there for North Spokane County connectivity.
