How tree-lined streets and high-speed internet can help with a warming climate – Kitsap Sun
Kevin Walthall| Columnist
I hope yall are all staying cool out there. Heres some positive perspective: it could be worse.
Last week's "heat dome" weather reminds me of Texas, except in Texas we dont call it a heat dome, we just call it summer. Thankfully Kitsap has been spared the Texas humidity that turns the air into a sticky mosquito soup. That humid air doesnt get cool in the shade, and Texas breezes are just the state trying to suffocate you with a dank pillow. Add Dallas or Houston smog to the soup for subtle tasting notes of Exxon-Mobile byproduct. Yum.
Think you can escape the heat in a Texas lake like you can a Kitsap lake? For a good/terrible time, Google "cottonmouth snakes." Oralligator gar, a Cretaceous-era Satan-fish inexplicably still living in the tepid brown pools Texans call lakes.
So it isnt all bad. You can thank your lucky stars you arent in Texas.
With the heat wave giving a scary glimpse of our climate change future, it seems like a good time to think about streets built for heat waves and telecommuting.
Thats right. Another article about complete streets.
Complete streets are streets built for everyone. Wide sidewalks, bike lanes or shared lanes, bus pull-outs, and ADA ramps are common features of complete streets.
Theyre generally showcase streets, attractive boulevards with landscaping and public art. They arent just tools for getting from A to B, theyre pleasant places to be, destinations in their own right. They attract investment and redevelopment. They give people transportation options outside the car. Complete streets are beneficial to the people who live next to them.
The conventional wisdom for the last 50 years or so has been that streets are for moving as many cars as fast as possible, and nothing else. The result has been stroads, byways that dont know if theyre neighborhood streets or inter-city roads. Some stroads, like 11th Street through West Bremerton, actually handle a large volume of carsand legitimately need to be four lanes wide. Others, like 6th Street or Naval Avenue, dont. Stroads are dangerous and ugly concrete rivers that divide neighborhoods and suck the life (and property values) out of their surroundings with high speed traffic. Maybe that works for commuters who see Bremerton as an obstacle between themselves and work, but for the people who actually live with stroads and pay for them with their taxes, its not worth it. Transportation budgets are slowly becoming more about transporting people than transporting cars.
Sometimes, cities will call these road diets. I dont like that term. Complete streets are fun, diets arent. Sure, 6th Street is chonky, but I dont just want it to become slimmer, I want it to become an asset to the community. As Ive said before, I would like complete streets to be accompanied by some type of complete street zoning, which would create small-town Main Streets along complete streets, providing opportunities for employment and recreation within walking distance of neighborhoods, creating a non-motorized, low-emissions transportation network throughout the city and affordable market-rate housing based on that transportation network rather than expensive parking and parkings attendant traffic.
In light of Mondays scorching heat and the economic shifts from the pandemic, I think two aspects of complete streets need to come into focus: street trees and high-speed internet.
Perhaps by now weve all read about the effects of heat bubbles or heat islands in urban areas. Heat bubbles are caused by the suns heat being reflected off of roads, parking lots, and buildings. When all that asphalt and roofing heats up in a concentrated urban area, it creates pockets of extreme heat, as in the case of Seattle and Bremerton.
Theres no way to avoid having roads, parking lots, and rooftops in urban areas, but we can mitigate their effects to a degree with vegetation in various forms. Landscaping in parking lots helps with stormwater runoff, absorbing and purifying rainwater as it runs from oil-slicked parking lots into aquifers and seas. Trees extend their branches over asphalt, catching the suns rays and capturing its energy. We can even go so far as to have green roofs, which are specially designed to host moss and lichens, succulents, or grasses. Plants take the energy of the sun and pollution from cars and use it in photosynthesis to create the plants energy. Its the best deal in the history of deals.
The recent heat wave makes street trees seem like an essential component of complete streets. Street trees are pretty. Humans have a biological and neurological need to see trees and greenery. Trees improve property values. Trees are the Swiss Army Knife of urban improvement but theyre also essential to making Bremerton more resilient towards climate change. According to the U.S. Forest Service Center for Urban Forest Research, street trees can lower the temperature of streets by 6 to 10 degrees, mitigating the heat island effect. Street trees also absorb CO2 emissions, helping with the root causes of climate change. When planted in the right places, trees can even diminish home cooling costs by 30%, for those of you who have air conditioning already.
These can be trees planted in medians or by sidewalks, but if we want Bremerton to roll with the punches of climate change, we need to view trees as a necessity for combating the heat bubble effect. The good news is that trees are cheap, abundant, pretty, efficient, and easy to maintain. Deciduous trees shade us in the summer and let light in during winter. Its really quite a polite thing for Mother Nature to do, if you think about it.
Second, I want to update the notion of complete streets to include fiber optic cable for high speed internet. This has largely come across my radar since Covid due to the rise and apparent permanence of remote working. We should absolutely be jumping on this. Every major disruption is an opportunity to pivot faster than the competition, and Covid is no exception. We can come out of this thing on top if were willing to think outside the box and make lemonade out of these catastrophic lemons.
With so many working from home and daily commutes nixed, people are realizing they can live anywhere they want, so theyre moving. Theres an extremely silver lining to that reality: we no longer have to offer tax breaks to attract major employers in order to import wealth. Major marketing and tech companies now effectively have offices through coworking spaces in Bremerton (Spark Commons, Bremerton Workspace), Silverdale (Have-A-Space), Poulsbo (Vibe Coworks, The Creative Consortium), and Bainbridge Island (Knack Coworking). Quality, high-paying jobs are located practically everywhere.
The question now becomes is this the sort of place people with good jobs want to live? If Bremerton is awesome, people with high-paying jobs will stay and their salaries will circulate in the local economy. If Bremerton keeps betting that Sears Roebuck is making a comeback, theyll move on.
Being awesome has never made more fiscal sense than it does right now. And weve got a great start on that front, with miles of beautiful coastline, fantastic parks, a farmers market, craft breweries, and the upcoming Quincy Square. Add in some leafy pedestrian boulevards lined with townhomes and boutique shops and restaurants, and these are the things that attract the high earners of the new economy, who splurge on experiences.
I think were only going to see more co-working spaces, and their presence means any web-based employer can be in any neighborhood. All co-working spaces need to succeed is a building for commercial use and access to high speed internet hence I think high-speed fiber internet should become the next ingredient in any complete street.
If mayoral candidate Bill Broughton has one big idea to campaign on, its his proposal to make the City of Bremerton a provider of high-speed fiber optic internet in the mold of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He sees this as a way to attract traditional office-based employers downtown, but I think it also has the potential to open up new high-paying employment opportunities in outlying neighborhoods as well. Competition is always a good thing, and Im looking forward to seeing him compete with incumbent Mayor Greg Wheeler. I think the idea of using the City to spread high speed internet has legs.
While street trees are an important adaptation to climate change, bringing employers to employees has the potential to dramatically reduce auto emissions from commuters, which is the number one source of carbon emissions both nationally and in Washington. We need to be thinking now about a hotter future with more expensive resources.
Kevin Walthall is a Bremerton resident and a regular contributor tothe Kitsap Sun. He also writes for the blog Urban Bremerton. Contact him atkswalthall@gmail.com.
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How tree-lined streets and high-speed internet can help with a warming climate - Kitsap Sun