Why weren’t there plans to make 1st Avenue safer when traffic moved over to Western? The people shouldn’t need to beg for safe streets, it needs to be standard practice within our transportation agencies.īut it doesn’t need to stay this way. Meanwhile, it seems that traffic volumes have dropped on nearby 1st Avenue due to this new Western highway. This does active harm to our city, it works against our climate and traffic safety goals, and it makes Belltown a less pleasant place to live and work. Seattle’s Office of the Waterfront made this timelapse over multiple years showing them tear down the highway that Seattleites wanted gone and replacing it with, well, a different highway. And frankly, everyone involved in pushing for this design should be ashamed. The decision to create this neighborhood highway was made years ago. The new highway connection was enormously expensive, and for what? To fill this neighborhood street with idling cars and make it uncomfortable to cross the street? Are the people sitting in these cars enjoying this? Who won here? The oil companies? And now it’s yet another multi-lane street that gets clogged up during busy times and encourages speeding and dangerous driving during the off-hours. In video I shot just a couple weeks ago, you can see what it was like before. But this month, Seattle opened a new highway connection, and the result is sadly predictable: a multi-lane traffic jam in the middle of a neighborhood. For five years, there was no connection between Alaskan Way on the waterfront and Western Ave in Belltown, and traffic was working about at well as it ever does. It is the year 2023, and Seattle just opened a new highway through the dense and walkable Belltown neighborhood. SDOT’s current trail design from the project website. It would likely also lead many trail users to simply ride on the sidewalk or in the street instead of using the trail, defeating the purpose of the project. The most recent design available on the project website still shows the trail crossing the street twice within a couple blocks, which would add significant delay for trail users and make the experience less intuitive. So far, the city has yet to release a trail design that meets the Port’s and trail advocates’ requests. “The Port also supports the city’s lane reductions in this corridor beyond the cruise terminal activity center to reduce vehicle traffic volumes and speed, which will also increase safety for all.” The key element of this design for the Port is a temporary detour for cyclists to an east side bike trail while cruise ships are loading and unloading.” The Commissioners also state that they support the city’s plan for a larger traffic safety redesign of the street. All five Seattle Port Commissioners signed a response letter saying “the Port supports a continuous, dedicated, west side bike trail. Seattle Neighborhood Greenways put out an action alert earlier this month calling on people to write the Seattle Port Commission and urge them to support a “seamless” waterfront trail. In response to the surge of letters they received from people concerned about Seattle’s plan to permanently route the waterfront bike path across Alaskan Way and back again near the Pier 66 cruise terminal, the Port of Seattle said it supports a trail on the west side of Alaskan Way so long as it can be detoured during busy cruise loading hours. Sure, the roar of the freeway is a bummer, but the views from the street between Denny and E Roy Street are great. Initially billed as an effort to celebrate “Capitol Hill’s front porch,” the project is an attempt to improve the walking and biking environment on this key route, which includes a connection to Lakeview Boulevard to the north and First Hill to the south, while also making it more enjoyable for the community to actually hang out on the street. I remember this being a day-one priority during the initial meeting of Central Seattle Greenways in February 2012. Many community members have been working with the city, winning grants and hosting an enormous amount of community outreach for more than a decade. The new bike lanes are part of the long-stewing, community-generated Melrose Promenade project.
For a couple blocks, including a sometimes stressful uphill section between Olive Way and Pine Street, we no longer needed to ride with cars in mixed traffic on Melrose Avenue.
We knew bike lanes were coming at some point, but it was still a wonderful surprise the day it happened. The other day my kid and I were biking the same route we bike every day on the way to preschool when something amazing happened: Part of the route had brand new bike lanes.
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