GAIT: Getting Around Issaquah Together

Despite the moribund appearance of our website, GAIT is still alive.

I hope to get back to posting here regularly and having some more visible activities available to folks soon (for some definition of “soon” ;-). In the mean time I thought I should get something up here for any new people who wander by.

Our Facebook page maintained by the lovely and talented Becky Brooks is the  most active evidence of our continued existence. Take a look and Like us to get occasional links of interest about walk/bike/bus tranportation. http://www.facebook.com/GettingAroundIssaquah

Otherwise, our mailing list (link in the sidebar) is the best way to keep up on GAIT activities. I’ll be sure to announce when the blog becomes more active as well.

Thanks for stopping by, and let us know if there’s anything we can do to make it easier for you to get around Issaquah.

Karen Behm has been working on a bike map for Issaquah for over a year now, and Tuesday afternoon the first edition came back from the printer! You can pick up your copy at the Visitor Center, Bicycle Center, or Veloce Velo. Or flag me down around town, I’ve got a stack in the trunk on my bike.

If you’d like to peer at it on your computer, you can download it right here as two big PDF files. One of 2MB for the map itself and another of a whopping 6.6MB for the back side with the notes, some ride directions, and other useful info.

But get a paper copy, it’s fabulous! And give Karen an attagirl next time you see her.

Big thanks to the City for funding this first printing out of the hotel room tax revenue. And big thanks to Councilman Fred Butler for cluing us in to that funding option.

UPDATE: The printed maps are all gone for the moment. Email us if you want one and we’ll put you on the list for when we get another print run funded or if we find some hiding in a corner somewhere.

Despite it being the first weekend of May, this is the April trash walk. We’ll be cleaning up the Sammamish Trail where it runs along the north side of SE 56th Street (otherwise known as NW Sammamish Road). Meet at 9am on Saturday by the plantings at the wacky intersection where SR-900 comes into 56th across from Arco and Tully’s/PCC/Holiday Inn. This map shows the spot. We’ll work our way east from there. I’ll have a few trash grabbers, a couple of brooms, and bags. You should bring some gloves and any other implements of destruction you might need. There are some swampy bits that may need attention so if you have rubber boots then wear or bring them. We’ll work for at least an hour and no more than two. Hope to see you!

Normally we’d be having a meeting this Wednesday night (third Wednesday), but we’re going to skip that for this month. Instead here are a couple of other opportunities to do GAIT stuff in the next few weeks.

This Saturday 4/18 GAIT will have a table at the city’s Earth Day event in the Pickering Barn during the farmers’ market. If you want to spend some time talking to people about walk/bike/bus transportation and GAIT, I could use some company and help.

Next Saturday 4/25 GAIT will again have a table in the barn, this time for the Hobby and Volunteer Fair. I could use help at this event too, so let me know if you have some time that day.

The last Saturday is usually our trash walk day, but it’s being pre-empted by Hobby and Volunteer Fair. Instead we’ll do our next GAIT Trash Walk on Saturday 5/2. The location this time is the Sammamish Trail which is the trail that runs along the north side of SE 56th Street by the soccer fields across from PCC and Costco. I’ll send a reminder a few days before identifying our starting point.

Wednesday 4/29 at 7pm in the Eagle Room at the police station is another opportunity to find out about the new group Sustainable Issaquah. At the earlier kick-off meeting, groups formed to start a community garden, to work on home energy efficiency, to promote local businesses, as well as several other focus areas.

Monday 5/4 at 7:30pm at the City Council’s regular meeting, the city will be holding a public hearing on the draft 2010-2015 Transportation Improvement Program. This is the list of projects the city hopes to build in the next five years. You can view the draft plan and a map.

Hope to see you at some of these events!

Can you believe it’s the last Saturday in March already?

This month we’re going to work on the boardwalk along SR900. Actually more _under_ the boardwalk.

We’ll start soon after 9am on Saturday (3/28). Meet at the service station at the corner of Gilman Blvd and SR900. We’ll work our way away from the freeway (South) from there. This will be another soggy one, so bring your mucky boots and gloves. I’ll be out there rain or shine. Cancel for sticking snow :-)

If you come to help and we’re nowhere in sight, give me a call and I’ll let you know what’s going on. My cell number is 425-503-6815.

Hope to see you!

We’re having a virtual meeting for March right here on the blog, so please come to order.

I’d like to review the plans for the year as set out in the earlier post about our January meeting.

Jeff Youngstrom will do and/or coordinate the following:

• Inventory of facilities
• Monthly (or more frequent) trash walks
• Web page improvements
• Attend Council Transportation Committee Meetings
• Table at appropriate community events

On the inventory front, I’ve been working on a form for people to use to note different features as we review the streets of Issaquah. I’ll test that out myself then I’ll be looking for a couple of beta testers to survey a street and see if the process makes sense to them. I’ll also be working on a way to present our findings, perhaps using Google Earth.

We’ve had two trash walks so far, both quite successful. The third is coming up on the 28th. This time we’re going to take a crack at the area around the boardwalk on the east side of SR-900 working our way south from Gilman Blvd. This will be another squishy one, so bring those waterproof boots. I’ll send a reminder next week.

Web page improvements have not progressed yet.

We’ve had a presence at each Council Transportation Committee meeting so far this year. I’ll try to be better about getting the agenda out ahead of time and posting a summary afterwards.

We haven’t done any tabling yet this year, but we’re lined up for three events so far. On Saturday, April 18 we’ll have a table for the city’s Earth Day celebration. On Saturday, April 25 we’ll be at the annual Hobby & Volunteer Expo. Both of those events will be at Pickering Barn. The other one we have lined up is the National Night Out in August.

Barb Shelton will coordinate moving us toward 501(c)(3) status.

I don’t know if Barb has had a chance to think about this. Barb?

Bob Miller will do the following:

• Wednesday evening guided bike rides
• “Fix a flat” class or classes (details on the first coming soon!)
• possibly other classes

Bob’s first “Fix a Flat” class is coming up next Tuesday (the 24th). Check with Bob to see if there’s still space. The evening rides are waiting for the evening light which is coming along.

There was a lot of interest in working on Safe Routes to Schools, especially in connection to the planned redevelopment at Issaquah High School. We’d especially like to get parents of school-aged children involved in an effort to push this issue with the school district and the city. I can’t remember if one person was going to take responsibility for this, but Tina Anderson, Barb Shelton, Karen Behm, and Erik Schneider all expressed interest.

This kind of fizzled when we discovered that the specific sidewalk we were concerned about at the high school was being added into the plans. The paper announced this week that a contractor has been chosen for the redevelopment project so we’ll see how that shapes up as construction begins.

Safe Routes to School is a really big issue that can have a huge impact. However, with our current slate of active members it feels like the time isn’t right for GAIT to make a major push for it.

Karen Shively volunteered to become our parade coordinator for the year, so if you want to be in the 4th of July or Salmon Days parades, or have an idea for an entertaining entry in either focused on transportation, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with her.

Karen and I have some ideas. If you’re interested in walking or biking in the parade(s), check in with one of us so we can keep you in the loop and so we know how many people we can expect to have participate if we do get this idea off the ground.

Finally, Karen Behm had the idea that we should meet with our new Police Chief and discuss issues of common interest. If you have something transportation-related that you’d like to discuss with the police, give a yell and we’ll add you to the meeting or add your issue to our list.

I never posted a recap of our February meeting, did I? Chief Ayers generously came to our February meeting and was very helpful in giving us a better understanding of how the police see their role as it relates to walk/bike/bus transportation. Perhaps the biggest message we got was that the Chief encouraged us to report any issues we see around town whether it’s grafitti or people parking on sidewalks or specific drivers not observing crosswalks. Your report may not always result in a citation to the offending party, but it will be recorded and contribute to evaluation of specific issues as time goes on. The non-emergency number for the Issaquah police is 425-837-3200. It’s a good one to have programmed in your cell phone so you’ll have it when you need it.

Does anyone have anything else we need to talk about this month? Leave a comment here if so.

Our February meeting will be Wednesday the 18th at 7pm at my house. If you’re interested and able, I hope you’ll join us. We’ll be checking progress against our goals for the year, checking if there are any other goals that anyone wants to take on, and if we’re lucky we’ll have a visit from Police Chief Ayers to talk about how we can work best with local law enforcement.

No, this isn’t a dead site.

We had our first GAIT meeting of 2009 this past Wednesday and spent the time talking about goals for this year and who might want to take charge of them. Here’s a summary of what we decided.

Jeff Youngstrom will do and/or coordinate the following:

• Inventory of facilities
• Monthly (or more frequent) trash walks
• Web page improvements
• Attend Council Transportation Committee Meetings
• Table at appropriate community events

Barb Shelton will coordinate moving us toward 501(c)(3) status.

Bob Miller will do the following:

• Wednesday evening guided bike rides
• “Fix a flat” class or classes (details on the first coming soon!)
• possibly other classes

There was a lot of interest in working on Safe Routes to Schools, especially in connection to the planned redevelopment at Issaquah High School. We’d especially like to get parents of school-aged children involved in an effort to push this issue with the school district and the city. I can’t remember if one person was going to take responsibility for this, but Tina Anderson, Barb Shelton, Karen Behm, and Erik Schneider all expressed interest.

Karen Shively volunteered to become our parade coordinator for the year, so if you want to be in the 4th of July or Salmon Days parades, or have an idea for an entertaining entry in either focused on transportation, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with her.

Finally, Karen Behm had the idea that we should meet with our new Police Chief and discuss issues of common interest. If you have something transportation-related that you’d like to discuss with the police, give a yell and we’ll add you to the meeting or add your issue to our list.

A small but mighty group of GAITers met this evening at the police station. We had Becky, Jeff, Lori, Paul, and Shirley. And a post-meeting visit with Kent at the bike rack.

We looked at the list of 58 things for GAIT to do that we came up with back in May. In pretty short order we were able to identify seven general areas that encompass all those ideas:

• Measurement
• Advocacy
• Promotion
• Improvement
• Education
• Group Activities/Identity
• Collaboration

And then we came up with some very rough draft statements of goals for each of those areas:

• Develop methods of measuring the ability and utilization of walk/bike/bus transportation
• Advocate walk/bike/bus transportation to citizens and city leaders and staff and business leaders
• Promote GAIT as a group in the community
• Improve the ability of people to get around Issaquah by walk/bike/bus
• Provide materials and training to educate people of all ages how to walk/bike/bus around Issaquah
• Organize activities to highlight the fun aspects of walk/bike/bus transportation and connect GAIT members
• Collaborate with other groups and entities to accomplish our mission

Clearly they need some wordsmithing, so if you have a clearer way of phrasing any of these goal statements then let me know. Likewise if you can’t fathom what we meant by one or more of them it would be great to know that too.

Next time we’ll collect any improved phrasing anyone’s come up with and go back from the general toward the specific to define some specific objectives for us to work on going forward.

I’m going to be out of town on the third Wednesday in June, so there will be no official GAIT meeting in June.

For July I have reserved the Eagle Room at the Police Station on Sunset Way for 7pm on Wednesday July 16th. Mark your calendars for that.