After making very few changes, the City Council passed the Seattle Transportation Plan (“STP”) this week, supplanting the 2014 Bicycle Master Plan and sending it to the city archives.
The STP is an ambitious document that attempts to combine all the city’s modal plans and transportation priorities into a single mega plan, resolving as many modal conflicts in advance of project development. Project development should go much more smoothly since the guidance for each street has been predetermined at a high level. Or at least that is the city’s hope. Now that the STP is official city policy, we will soon see how the framework holds up under pressure.
Seattle Bike Blog is still moving through our neighborhood-by-neighborhood analyses of the new plan, and posts about Central, NE and NW Seattle are coming soon. But the council did not have much of an appetite for making changes to the plan after it left Mayor Harrell’s office. Aside from a handful of minor changes and some additional whereas clauses, these are the Council’s substantive changes (PDF):
- Boost the section about building missing sidewalks
- Water down the 14th Ave NW bike lane in the plan
- Slightly water down the Pike Place Event Street proposal and rename it the Pike Place Access Review project (the adopted change is significantly less extensive than CM Kettle’s initial suggestion to defund the project, which received a lot of pushback)
Additionally, Council added a section outlining what they would like to see from future implementation plans, which you can find in their omnibus amendment (PDF):
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