SvR has been honored to work on Winslow Way, a street that is central to Bainbridge Island’s identity and embodies the essential community values: encouraging diversity, stewarding the environment, promoting a positive community identity, improving social connections, and enhancing the livability of downtown. When the City was confronted with the need to replace aging public and private utility infrastructures (water, sanitary sewer, storm drain, and overhead power and franchise utilities), the community seized the opportunity to improve the street by creating a vibrant pedestrian environment that supports multimodal mobility.

Working with Bainbridge Island from planning through construction, SvR helped the city realize this vision by creating a Complete/green streets approach that emphasized community values over vehicle speed. As a result, the revitalized Winslow Way will promotes mobility and safety for all users. Our civil engineers and landscape architects designed a high performance streetscape that enhances Winslow as a community center. The project developed an urban design strategy that allows for multimodal and multi-use activity and provides street furnishings and amenities that establish rooms for gathering and resting.

Our integrated team was eager to coordinate the need to manage stormwater with other street design needs. Thus, green stormwater infrastructure systems like raingardens, stormwater planters, Silva Cells™ and porous pavements were deployed for multiple benefits: improving water quality, buffering pedestrians from traffic, providing settings for public art, and shortening crossing distances at intersections.

The underground utility systems were designed to accommodate construction phasing and street closures. Street lighting was designed and coordinated with Puget Sound Energy to integrate new catenary street lights as well as pedestrian level lighting. Signal and intersection improvements were coordinated with the Washington State Department of Transportation at the intersection with State Route 305.

The project was successfully bid December in 2010 and is currently under construction. The project is expected to be completed during summer 2011.