When Assistant City Prosecutor Michael Vander Giessen was an 18-year-old college student at Whitworth University, the new Spokanite made a classic boneheaded out-of-towner mistake: He tried to bike on Division.
It didn't go well.
He survived the route from Whitworth south to the old Costco near the intersection of Cascade Way and Division Street, but biking down the hill on his return trip he heard a big pickup truck rumble up behind him. He recalls the driver screaming something at him and believes the guy tossed a bottle at him — Vander Giessen could hear the glass shatter.
"I thought, 'This was a terrible idea. I shouldn't be here,'" Vander Giessen recalls. "But I also felt a sense of violation: I felt like, 'Well, what else am I supposed to do? Why is this so impassable by a bicycle?' It sent a message to me at the time: Spokane doesn't care about bicyclists."
In fact, bicycling on much of Division, one of Spokane's major arterials, is technically illegal. After all, it's the dedicated north-south route for freight traffic.
But Division isn't just awful for wayward cyclists. It's miserable for everyone else too. Motorists hate being stuck in an endless gauntlet of traffic lights or trying to cross six lanes to get from one side of the street to another. Pedestrians hate walking beside the rumbling vehicles. Truckers hate the slow stop-start traffic.
"Division is a state and federal highway that is carrying traffic from not just the Spokane region, but all the way into North Idaho, all the way up to the border of Canada," says Spencer Gardner, Spokane's planning director. "Division sort of got caught in the crossfire."
But when the north-south freeway, aka the North Spokane Corridor, to the east is finally finished, everything could change.
The amount of freight traffic and just-passing-through traffic is expected to plummet. In fact, a computer model completed by traffic software company Iteris predicts that even though north-south traffic throughout the region is expected to leap by 37 percent from 2015 to 2040, traffic on Division and its one-way couplet partner, Ruby Street, is anticipated to actually fall by 8 percent.
For the region's transportation planners, it's a once-in-a-city's-lifetime opportunity for a wholesale makeover of one of the city's biggest routes, stretching from downtown Spokane to past Whitworth, north of the city limits.
Since 2020, planners have been sketching out plans to reinvent Division, moving it away from an automotive hellscape into something better for bus riders, pedestrians and even — on some stretches — cyclists. Last week the Spokane City Council voted to adopt the latest update of that regional plan, DivisionConnects, which outlines an official strategy for the arterial route, scheduled to be completed in 2029.
"It would be more oriented to local needs," as opposed to freight traffic, says County Commissioner Al French, a longtime transit advocate.
"It's a cool opportunity to make Division a more humane place," says Colin Quinn-Hurst, a transportation planner with the city. "A place where people enjoy being. That's the coolest aspect."
Wait, the Inlander asks, does that mean Division is an inhumane place right now?
"Have you walked on Division?" Gardner jumps in, with a kind of rhetorical chuckle.
FULL STREETS AHEAD
Next year, the long-anticipated electric "City Line" bus rapid transit route is primed to launch, taking passengers with frequent and reliable service between Browne's Addition and Spokane Community College in the Chief Garry neighborhood.
Think of the DivisionConnects plan as the bigger and brasher sequel to the City Line.
Unlike the City Line, Division is slated to have exclusive "Business Access and Transit" lanes. These lanes will have two uses. Buses will have exclusive use of the lanes, but motorists can use them for making right turns while entering or exiting a business. Ideally, it's the best of both worlds.
"You don't have the same impact from trying to widen the road, to put it in a transit lane or put in dedicated turn lanes," says Karl Otterstrom, planning and development officer for Spokane Transit Authority.
It lets buses travel faster without clogging up traffic or taking up too much street space with a traditional bus lane. These lanes would stretch for 5 miles — almost the entire corridor — from where Division crosses the Spokane River to the "Y" where the North Newport Highway splits off from Division.
The full route, from downtown Spokane to the Hastings Park & Ride north of Whitworth, would be served entirely by zero-emission buses. Those might be electric buses with charging stations like with the City Line, Otterstrom says, or they could be buses powered by hydrogen fuel cells or some other new technology.
Weekdays, buses will be available to catch every 10 minutes. Nights and weekends, buses on most of the route will run every 15 minutes.
For bus riders, that's pretty good. As for people on bikes? The plans show them getting something they've been craving for decades along the Ruby couplet near downtown: a "cycle track" protected bike lane, physically separated from the roadway. With a decrease in traffic, there's room for such a shared street.
"The couplet was where there was the most opportunity to be creative, just because there's so much capacity with both of those streets running four-lanes each," says Quinn-Hurst. That's particularly ideal, he says, considering all the Gonzaga University students nearby.
The protected bike lanes won't extend all the way to the Whitworth area where Vander Giessen was once menaced by a pickup truck. But that doesn't mean cyclists are out of luck. Quinn-Hurst says the city has about 30 active transportation projects being developed simultaneously to the Division street rehab, including a network of protected bikeways and other bicycle improvements running parallel to Division.
French is brimming with optimism.
"What I anticipate is those that either rely on bike or rely on public transportation are going to love the new system," French says. "I think those that are auto-oriented are going to love the system because they're not fighting with semis and motorhomes."
ROUND TRIP
In some senses, this is not a reinvention of Division so much as a back-to-the-roots reboot — a return to what the street once was.
In the early decades of Spokane, Division was the route of the Lidgerwood Park Electric Railway, a major north-south streetcar route that connected the railroad workers of Hillyard to the city center.
"That lower part of Division really became an important commercial hub," says Otterstrom, who is also a local transit history buff. All those pedestrians allowed businesses to flourish.
"Their wallet is accessible," Otterstrom says. "They're not confined to their vehicle."
But times changed. Streetcars were discarded as the automobile began to dominate. Division became both a highway and, eventually, a retail destination dotted with big-box stores like Costco and shopping centers like NorthTown Mall.
"In its heyday, it was a destination point," French says. "All roads lead to NorthTown."
But the advent of online shopping has meant that the auto-dependent retail has been struggling — Division has seen vacancies pop up all along the corridor. Once packed parking lots are now prairies of empty pavement.
French recalls former Mayor David Condon fretting about what this kind of disinvestment could mean for the city.
"One of his big concerns was that the city of Spokane was going to be the hole in the middle of the doughnut," French says. "That development would happen around the city, but there was no real investment inside the city."
Similarly, Otterstrom recalls a city planning director approaching STA in 2009, with worries that all the focus on enlivening neighborhood centers risked letting Division wilt and die as a commercial corridor. That hasn't quite happened — NorthTown Mall still has tenants.
Still, Google Maps shows at least three different Halloween-themed stores haunting the vacant husks of Division businesses this year alone, including the former Macy's space in NorthTown Mall.
"Areas that are more reliant on automobile traffic are more vulnerable to those shifts over time," Otterstrom says.
That's where the bigger hope for this project comes in. Theoretically, transit can spur new development, and new kinds of higher density neighborhoods, the kind that look a little more like Kendall Yards or Browne's Addition, served by cool restaurants and local coffee shops.
"They can enjoy life in a 15-minute walking area," says Gardner, the planning director, calling such a neighborhood vision "the newest fad when it comes to talking about cities."
As for those big parking lots along Division that rarely get full these days? Gardner says developers might see some of that space as an opportunity to put in a new building, whether a new commercial business or even more desperately needed housing with focus around the transit line.
There's still a lot of ground to cover between now and when the North Spokane Corridor theoretically opens in 2028. STA has surveys open on their website asking about what the downtown section of the route should look like and where to put bus stops on Division. And some local politicians question the wisdom of such a plan, considering the mercurial timeline of the north-south highway, which was first envisioned in 1946.
"If that's not completed by the time changes here happen, I think we're going to see significant irritation," City Council member Jonathan Bingle said at the meeting when DivisionConnects was adopted.
Then there's the challenge of paying for it: The new rapid transit plan already has $50 million dedicated from the state, but it will need to win at least $91 million in federal grants. What's more, voters will have to renew local transit levies to pay for the rest.
But Otterstrom is optimistic enough to believe that the transformation could even be linguistic.
"We don't have the same local vocabulary to understand what we can do to make transit matter. Advocates need words," he says, noting that most Spokanites have limited experience with public transit outside of Spokane.
Otterstrom thinks the DivisionConnects project could do a lot for the city, including expanding our understanding of what riding your bike or the bus means. ♦
