Getting There: Airway Heights seeking community input on plans to make U.S. 2 more walkable, bikable, friendly to local businesses

Feb. 4—The city of Airway Heights has never had much of a downtown.

The growing city's business district is centered along the main thoroughfare for airmen headed to Fairchild Air Force Base and outdoorsmen headed to Leavenworth. U.S. Highway 2 also serves as the primary way residents of Airway Heights get to and fro while running errands.

All of that traffic has made U.S. 2 a congested, dangerous corridor for residents and local business owners who have put down roots in the area. A Washington State Department of Transportation study found more than 540 crashes occurred along the corridor from 2015 to 2019, eight of which involved serious injuries and four of which were fatal.

After years of analyzing and planning, the city is now moving forward with efforts to alleviate those concerns, and turn the area into a bustling downtown district, by reshaping the stretch of highway that runs through the heart of the city.

The city will unveil an early conceptual design for a litany of changes to the section of U.S. 2 between Lundstrom Street and Lawson Street on Monday night at the first of many open houses planned this year. The meeting will begin at 5 p.m. at the Hub and is intended to gather community input on the slate of proposed changes, which could include installing several more turn signals and traffic lights along the highway, adding on-street parking to parallel West 14th Avenue and the addition of a multi-use pathway for cyclists and pedestrians separated from the highway by a 6-foot buffer.

Plans to establish a true downtown district have been in the works for more than a decade, City Manager Albert Tripp said.

"We started off by casting a vision for what U.S. 2 could look like, community business owners, Department of Transportation, tribes within the area of the county," Tripp said. "Like a lot of things, one would desire to, like, snap your fingers and have it occur overnight, but in reality, it doesn't work that way."

Tripp said the plans for the strip between Lundstrom and Lawson are part of a larger project aimed at developing U.S. 2 into an area where travelers, residents and airmen can access local businesses easier. Doing so will not only help the local economy, but will also help the city find a sense of community and identity that it currently lacks.

"We have been breaking down a much bigger project into much smaller chunks, and then you got to dive deeper and get into the nuts and bolts in terms of figuring out how can that vision actually come to fruition on the ground and be built out," Tripp said. "Then once we have success on that, we're gonna move to the next phase and continue to repeat and repeat essentially till the entire corridor is built out."