Lauren
@lpangborn
Product designer in tech Aspiring real estate developer 🏢 Urbanist and bike advocate in Spokane Columnist for @rangemedia.co
I sometimes hear local folks say they don’t want to promote outdoor rec here because “their” spots would get crowded. Well I was just on our river, close to downtown, at a relatively new put-in, on a *gorgeous* evening, and was the only person there! There’s still LOTS of room for promotion
Okay I’ve uploaded and deleted like seven different clips trying to circumvent Bluesky’s horrible compression. You’ll have to live with a still shot
New experience for me today: riding through a freshly burned section of Riverside State Park [don’t worry, the firefighters said I could go through]
And there are TONS of blocks just like this in Spokane. This is Indiana on the west side. It is 50ft wide. There is simply no funding source to expand sidewalks/add medians to every local access street that was overbuilt.
Real lift example: The city of Spokane wants to do some preventative maintenance on Astor, a local access street — low speeds, low volumes, few destinations — but it’s going to cost a shitton to do because the street is SIXTY EIGHT FEED WIDE. It’s wider than Francis, a five lane state highway.
Great opportunity to ride the Monroe Street Bridge. @snyderzzz.bsky.social is out there with the Yes for Buses trailer
Spokane now has critical-mass-style rides a few times per summer, appropriately called “Bike Party”. Hundreds of people join! More proof that the safer people feel, the more they’ll ride.
Wow wow wow the Hiawatha is awesome. Not sure why I didn’t ride it until today.
It’s me, the annoying friend with a 360 camera. But seriously, this is less than a mile from downtown Spokane. Our outdoor rec opportunities *within city limits* are out of this world
Looks like the city is also planning some tiny roundabouts on the new greenways. Love me a tiny roundabout!
Looking through public plan docs and stumbled upon this. I think it might be the city's first installation of a diverter on a greenway (imo, greenways aren't greenways without diverters!). This is Adams and 16th, serving the Adams Greenway. These are concrete, Toronto-like barriers.
We live in an incredibly beautiful place. This is a five minute ride from my house! My wife bought me a 360 camera so expect me to be (even more) insufferable about active transportation infrastructure in Spokane
Did a handful of laps on the closed-to-cars Maple St Bridge yesterday! Not surprisingly at all, when places are safe to walk and roll on, lots of people do so
Helluva bike party tonight! Had to have been a couple hundred cyclists out there
Walking on the Centennial in Kendall Yards has been much more pleasant this week with the Maple St Bridge closed. It’s easy to forget how loud and polluting roads like this are until they’re suddenly quiet
It is CRAZY to me that there are ten (10!!!) empty lots right behind the most popular development in the city, less than a mile from downtown, a couple blocks from the centennial trail. We sorely need this bill!
City removes 45 parking spots — less than .01% — to improve safety under the viaducts DSP:
Parks board is getting an update on what seems to be this project: New 5 mile trail on the north side of the river in Spokane Valley, from Flora to Plante’s Ferry. Parallels the Centennial, but on the north side of the river rather than south side.
~10,000 rode transit to Bloomsday (if my math is correct!) ~300 rode bikes (270 in the Spokane Bicycle Club corral — which was PACKED — and lots parked in Riverfront corrals) I also saw lots walking from Kendall Yards. A true multimodal day!
Pretty amazing what closing 7.5+ miles of road does for a community. 40,000 runners, hundreds of volunteers, a countless spectators took over the streets. Yay Bloomsday!
The racist Monaghan statue in downtown Spokane has been removed. A win for human rights and a win for our transportation system, as the statue was preventing a very necessary reconfiguration of the traffic island for peds and bikes.
Spokane has two buildings that feature enormous milk bottles. They’re treasured! If these were proposed today, people would flip
Pleasantly surprised by the response to this in r/Spokane www.reddit.com/r/Spokane/s/...
Spokane City Council bans new drive thrus, gas stations, and car washes on most major arterials www.inlander.com/news/spokane...