On August 31, 2022 Ray Delahanty - known on YouTube as CityNerd - spotlighted Aurora Ave N as a case study of a dangerous American Stroad (“Street-Road”). He also gave the Aurora Reimagined Coalition a nice shout-out for our ongoing advocacy efforts. Thanks Ray!
When the US interstate system was built in the 1950s and 60s, it relegated the previously built state highways to what seems like an eternal purgatory: not that useful anymore for pure speed and mobility, but too far gone to be useful as urban main streets. Just...caught in between.
This is the textbook definition of a stroad: an urban or suburban street that attempts to have the mobility function of a highway, while also trying to fulfill the residential, commercial and community functions of an urban street. Orphan highway all over the US are in this middling state, and you can see why -- all the new federal and state investment went to freeways (and still does), and these legacy highways, which often grew organically from pre-automobile trade routes, were left largely unattended.
So today's video is a case study on an orphan state highway, State Route 99 in north Seattle, AKA Aurora Avenue. We'll do a field visit and look at all the ways Aurora fails the people who live, work, and play there, examine the legacy of north Seattle's substandard urban infrastructure, and look at recent improvements to transit that might be a starting point for a better future.
Finally, we'll talk about how advocacy groups, the City, WSDOT, and King County Metro are coming together to reimagine the street, and how Aurora attracted $50 million in this year's state infrastructure package to make real changes on one of the street's most challenged segments.