Under Mayor Harrell’s leadership, bike, walk and bus improvements that required years of outreach can be removed without any notice – UPDATE: The bus lane is saved!
When neighbors asked the city to make Lake Washington Boulevard safer for people walking and biking, the city kicked off a half-decade public outreach process that stalled out once Bruce Harrell became mayor before concluding with a lackluster plan to add some speed humps and a couple stop signs. Then without any outreach at all, Seattle Parks this summer announced they were cancelling the rest of the speed humps and stop signs after building just a handful of them.
But when a few business and property owners asked the city to allow cars to use the bus-only access point to westbound Union Street from Madison Street that was part of the extensive RapidRide G project, SDOT got to work making it happen without any public outreach at all. How will allowing car traffic affect crosswalk safety? How will the change impact safety for the eastbound bike lane? I cannot tell you because there is no project website, and SDOT has not yet responded to my requests for more details even though the project is already under construction. The only reason we even know this is happening is because someone from Central Seattle Greenways saw workers jackhammering away and asked them about it (Ryan Packer was also asking questions even before work began).
UPDATE: SDOT released a blog post announcing they will go ahead with the elements to allow the Route 2 bus to use the lane, but will not open the street to car traffic. Good work everyone who helped sound the alarm! The bike lane changes are staying, including the diagonal crossing at 11th Avenue.
When Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck heard about the surprise change, she went there herself and talked to the work crews to find out what’s happening. Then she posted a video saying that she “disagrees with SDOT’s decision” and her staff is working on what to do “before this Saturday” when crews are scheduled to conduct more work.
https://bsky.app/profile/councilmember-amr.bsky.social/post/3m263tlgg2c25
The Transit Riders Union also has an online petition going to “Save our Union St bus lane!” that has 2,145 signatures as of press time. CHS also reports that TRU is planning a protest rally at the site 8 a.m. Saturday morning.
There are multiple layers of insult at work here. There’s the fact that the city would choose to allow cars to drive in what is currently a car-free access point to the Pike/Pine business district. Worse, the city is doing it without any public outreach or even any prior notification. Even worse still, the city is demonstrating a gross double-standard in which community efforts to improve our streets for walking, biking or transit are forced to slog through an endless public process while a change that benefits car drivers at the direct expense of everyone else does not require any public notice at all. Worried about your kid getting killed while biking to the park? Organize a big public campaign, get your fix into the annual city budget, then engage with a public outreach consultant for one to five years and then maybe the city will fix the issue or at least do a little something that is better than nothing. Are you a property owner who wants to allow cars in the busway? Just fire off a few emails and it will happen with no process at all.
“Over the last few months, communications were restarted primarily at the request of Dunn & Hobbes, the owner of the Chophouse property, Hunters Capital, and Madrona Real Estate along with business representatives on 12th Avenue north of Madison Street,” an SDOT spokesperson told Capitol Hill Seattle. They went on to stress to CHS that the project is intended to help people driving into the heart of Capitol Hill from the Eastside and other wealthy Seattle neighborhoods. “While development in the area is meant to maximize the appeal of dense urban living, coming off the impacts of COVID and challenges of major street and sidewalk construction, representatives had specific concerns about customers who drive from the Eastside or neighborhoods like Madison Park and Madrona […] They are having a hard time getting to their destinations or are confused by the new traffic pattern.”
This is a pattern for the city under Mayor Harrell. When SDOT repaved Denny Way, there was hardly any discussion at all about adding desperately-needed bus lanes as part of the very high-budget project despite our city’s stated goals of prioritizing walking, biking and transit improvements when making transportation investments. The city was only forced to give their unconvincing reasons for excluding the bus lanes after hundreds of people clowned on them by racing (and defeating) the 8 bus while playing leap frog and line dancing and performing other silly displays of bus inefficiency on the street. As Ryan Packer at the Urbanist put it, “What’s easier than adding a bus lane in Seattle? Deleting one.” This little bus lane on Union Street is itself worth fighting for, but it is also representative of a larger recurring problem with Mayor Harrell’s SDOT that has been getting much worse since the departure of former SDOT Director Greg Spotts. Harrell is demonstrating how he will handle transportation issues in his second term when he no longer needs to convince voters to pass a major transportation levy, which is why Seattle Bike Blog has endorsed his opponent Katie Wilson.
Allowing cars through here will have a direct negative impact on biking and walking because people will now have a whole new source of car traffic to cross that wasn’t there before. There will be new conflict points and new delays. From what I have been able to discern, no bike groups were consulted about the changes or how to handle the new crossing. People heading east on Union need to transition from a one-way bike lane on the south side of the street to a two-way bike lane on the north side of the street. Before workers destroyed it this week, that transition happened near the bus lane, so people biking east only have to cross a single bus-only lane to get from the one-way lane to the two-way lane:
The bike crossing on Union south of 12th Ave before crews jackhammered the concrete triangle away.
But by allowing oncoming car traffic, the city also feels the need to change the bike lane transition. It sounds like SDOT is rolling out their go-to solution that everyone hates: A diagonal bike lane crossing through the middle of an all-way stop intersection. I cannot confirm the details because SDOT has not published materials about them, but an SDOT spokesperson told CHS they would be “redirecting people biking eastbound to the north side of Union St sooner, to shift the crossing from midblock to the all-way stop controlled intersection at 11th Ave and Union St.” So I assume it will be the mirror version of the 9th and John intersection near Denny Park (UPDATE: Workers have repainted the bike crossing, confirming that it is such a diagonal crossing. Thanks Matt Baume!):
9th and John before the green paint (I guess I don’t have a more recent photo). I flipped it horizontally to give an idea of what 11th and Union might look like facing west with a diagonal bike lane crossing.
UPDATE: Here’s
a photo of the repainted bike lane by Matt Baume.
Navigating an intersection like this is a dramatically worse biking experience than crossing a single bus-only lane. It is both less safe and less inviting to use. It’s not the worst possible bike crossing, but it has some significant issues. The problem with these diagonal crossings is that people biking have a very long crossing and must watch for threats in a 270-degree range the whole time because there are four different places where someone in a car could blow through the stop sign or proceed out of turn because they don’t understand that you are going to bike diagonally. Biking safely in a city requires riders to always be on the lookout for someone in a car who is not following the rules because you bear the consequences of their mistakes, and these diagonal crossings have so many possible conflict points riders have to watch for all at the same time. Would you feel comfortable letting an 8-year-old child navigate through this intersection on her own? Because that’s the all ages and abilities standard we are supposed to be trying to achieve, and it falls short here.
SDOT should cancel work on this project and restore the previous condition. Then if they want to put forward a proposal to reopen it to car traffic, they can make their case to the public about why we should invest public money to make it easier for more people to drive cars into the heart of the Pike/Pine business district and listen to people’s feedback. If they can’t make a good case, then they shouldn’t do it. Maybe realigning the bike lane is the best option for bus and street operations for reasons I can’t figure out on my own. That’s totally possible, but they haven’t given folks any chances to understand what is happening or why, so the public’s only real option is to demand that work stop. I’m not saying it needs endless outreach, but there should be some happy point between zero notice and a half decade of consultant-led meetings. And the same standard should apply to walk, bike and transit improvements as well. Propose a change, listen to feedback, make a decision.
I will update this post if I hear back from SDOT (I asked for project design drawings and whether they had conducted any outreach).
https://bsky.app/profile/mattbaume.bsky.social/post/3m26egjfuss2r
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