The trail was built in the 1970s along
part of the original Seattle, Lake Shore and
Eastern Railway corridor. It was named for
Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman, two
of the founders of the railway in 1885.
Beginning in Golden Gardens Park on
Puget Sound, the path cuts east through
the northern Seattle neighborhoods of
Ballard, Fremont and Wallingford and then
hooks directly through the University of
Washington campus. From there, it edges
northwest for several miles out along Lake
Washington, where you’ll be excused for
swooning clear off the path at the sight of
Mount Rainier glistening to the south on
a clear day. (The volcano is a showstopper
no matter how many times you’ve seen it.)
Passing from neighborhood to neighbor-
hood, the Burke-Gilman eventually curls
around the northern tip of the lake toward
the community of Bothell, where it merges
seamlessly into the Sammamish River Trail.
With so many access points and des-
tinations, thousands of people have a
personal story and connection, a share of
ownership, a reason to call it “my” path.
Whether they’re 30-year season-ticket
holders who walk to the stadium every
game, or they used the corridor to train for
their first Seattle Marathon, trail users on
the Burke-Gilman often have an unusually
strong attachment to the pathway.
The emotional connection that makes
the trail so popular also means it is impor-
tant to design any changes to the Burke-
Gilman with a great deal of care, sensitivity
and community input. That’s really what
sets the trail apart: Rather than look at
community engagement as an obstacle or a
cumbersome process to be dreaded, Burke-
Gilman trail managers view neighborhood
involvement as vital to the trail’s success.
For the Burke-Gilman, the result is a
trail with supreme community integra-
tion—of partners, ideas and infrastruc-
ture—that attracts new fans every day.
School Is In
Just ask Josh Kavanagh, director of
University of Washington Transportation
Services, who moved to Seattle in 2007
after working in a similar role at the
University of New Mexico. “The commu-
nity’s connection to this trail is incredibly
deep,” he says. “It means so much to so
many different people.”
From his office building across the street
from the Burke-Gilman, Kavanagh gets a
front-row seat to observe the 1.7-mile trail
segment the university manages. (Other
segments are managed by the city of Seattle
and King County.) With the volume of trail
users projected to nearly double by 2030,
Kavanagh knows that one of his most press-
ing tasks is to figure out how to accommo-
date that traffic safely and efficiently.
Partly fueling the uptick in trail traffic
is a recent boom in on- or near-campus
student housing. The 2013 freshman class
of 6,255 students is the university’s larg-
est to date, and since 2010, the share of
students living within one mile of UW
has grown from 29 to 39 percent. Several
large new apartment complexes, such
as the newly opened Mercer Court, sit
directly alongside the Burke-Gilman.
The biggest driver of future growth,
though, will be the arrival of a Central
Link light rail stop on campus in 2016.
Operated by Sound Transit
(
soundtransit.
org
),
Link light rail currently runs 15.9
miles from Seattle-Tacoma International
Airport to downtown Seattle. The next
two stops to open will be in Capitol
Hill and then at Husky Stadium across
the street from the Burke-Gilman Trail.
Every 7.5 to 15 minutes throughout the
day, this new stop will deposit dozens of
passengers—many of whom will cross
directly onto the trail to reach campus
and the UWMedical Center. “We knew
introducing light rail adjacent to the trail
was going to bring disruptive change,” says
Kavanagh. “Something needed to be done,
or we’d have a crisis on our hands.”
Ears to the Ground
For the past couple of years, UW has been
working closely with a number of local
partners—including Sound Transit, King
County, Puget Sound Regional Council
and Puget Sound Clean Air Agency—to
prepare for this challenge. As Kavanagh’s
team started planning the trail redesign,
called the Burke-Gilman Trail Multi-
Modal Connector, they knew the success
of any changes would hinge on maximum
community buy-in and support. So they
expanded their outreach to advocacy
groups, neighborhoods, parks and adviso-
ry boards, requesting feedback and letting
folks know about plans for the trail. Signs
along the Burke-Gilman have advertised
the approaching changes for months.
The response has been enormous.
“
We’ve been overwhelmed by the com-
munity’s enthusiasm in making an invest-
ment in this resource they treasure,” says
Kavanagh.
Drawing from that wealth of feedback,
the blueprint for the redesign incorpo-
rates a number of innovations, notably
grade-separated lanes: asphalt for cyclists,
concrete for pedestrians and a compressed
gravel path for runners. Marking each lane
will be four-inch, sloped mini-curbs—not
disruptive enough to endanger users, but
elevated enough to keep them alert to the
different spaces.
Another big improvement will be
streamlining access points. If you count
all the “cow path” connections to the
trail, says Kavanagh, there are about
80
access points on the campus sec-
tion alone—often random, and mostly
unmarked. The plan is to consolidate
down to 19 “mixing zones” that make
trail access and travel behavior safe and
predictable, or “legible,” to all users.
A pilot section of the
Burke-Gilman redesign at
the University of Washington
Tracy Hadden Loh
erik stuhaug/seattle children’s hospital
rails
to
trails
u
spring/summer.14
17