Written by Sidewalks are costing up to two million dollars per mile in Seattle. This is a daunting pricetag, and we are seeing sidewalk prices heading this direction in Renton as well. The reason for this is that new ADA provisions, along with stormwater, curbing, and other road design requirements prevent us from simply using the old four-inch-thick-slab-of-concrete-at-grade mentality. Each sidewalk now has to be architecturally designed and engineered to meet the latest standards. This truley is for the public benefit, and really helps those who are mobility challenged; I support this improved design, but boy is it ever expensive. I hope we can find ways to slow these cost increases, or even reverse them (maybe?), in the future.
ready for the next pour…:-)
When I was a kid, I remember when I and a group of school classmates were informed by a city engineer that new freeways cost over one-million dollars per mile! “No way” we all said, in disbelief that a freeway could cost so much. Who would have guessed we would be paying twice this amount for a sidewalk in 2007!
Giving everyone a sidewalk is no walk in the park
By Sanjay Bhatt
Seattle Times staff reporter
Jim Portillo walks in the roadway, just a few feet from passing cars, because there are no sidewalks along his Greenwood street. Portillo, 31, is blind.
Sweeping the area ahead left to right with a white cane, he avoids the roadway’s gravel shoulder — if it exists at all — because ditches or parked cars frequently interrupt the path.
He shrugs and says he’s been dealing with the danger for five years.
“There’s not a lot of room between me and traffic,” he says. “Every now and then you wonder about some drivers.”
Forty percent of Seattle streets lack full sidewalks on both sides of the road — totaling 650 miles, the city estimates — but installing them is a staggering expense of about $2 million per mile. It’s not just the cost of the pavement: When a curb is built, it changes the flow of surface water, triggering legal requirements for drainage systems, which in turn can involve buying adjacent property. Many cities can build them only as part of a major street-paving project.
But residents are demanding sidewalks, and cities and counties are looking for ways to pay for them. Olympia turned to utility bills. Bellevue taps its capital budget. And King County spends about $1 million a year out of its roads fund. Snohomish County has committed $2 million annually to sidewalks and roads.
For the first time, Seattle has devoted money just for building new sidewalks — enough to install less than a mile a year citywide. Over the next nine years, taxpayers will foot the bill through a levy approved last year.
Next month, the city’s transportation department is holding open houses to ask residents to rank proposed sidewalks, traffic signals and other suggestions it received this summer by the hundreds.
The department will use those comments to determine which big projects to tackle out of a $1.5 million annual pot. The city’s 13 district councils get to split an additional $1.2 million a year for small projects, which frustrates neighborhood activists who want a say in how all the money gets spent.
The City Council, which has adopted pedestrian safety as its highest priority this year, is looking for ways to speed up sidewalk construction.
“It seems insurmountable, but at least we could start chipping away at it,” Council President Nick Licata said.
In addition to being a visual cue to drivers to slow down, sidewalks give residents a chance to interact with each other, says Nicole La Chasse, a real-estate agent who lives in North Beach.
you are wrong
Mr. Corman you are exaggerating or misrepresenting again and ignoring the issues people are in need of having you working on. You are implying that our sidewalks would cost 2 million per mile and they wont. They cost 2 million per mile when the management is a bunch of knuckleheads. I know that it is about 30 bucks a foot. A mile is 5,280 feet. So concrete goes up in price, and it is 50 a foot. You have real facts on how much it would cost to do Harrington Ave? Maybe you should do the math, get a real bid, and then do the hard work of seeing how to get some management in there that will not steal so much money. People are not that gullible, are they?