I was all set to write up a story about the uncertain future of the Ballard Missing Link of the Burke-Gilman Trail when, in a last-minute Hail Mary minutes before official adoption, Councilmember Dan Strauss reintroduced his previously-failed amendment to fund his trail connection plan via Leary Way and Market Street and found the votes to get it passed. Councilmembers Cathy Moore and Rob Saka switched their stances from a week ago to join Joy Hollingsworth, Tammy Morales, Tanya Woo and Strauss in voting yes. The funds were shifted out of the significantly-increased paving budget line.
The Burke-Gilman amendment (PDF) was the only change made Tuesday to the $1.55 billion transportation levy proposal (PDF), and it brought the total spending line for bicycle safety to $133.5 million. It may also have signaled a city policy change to shift focus from the fully-designed Shilshole trail route, which remains held up in court, to the Leary/Market route. The Leary/Market design has received lukewarm support from bicycle advocates, though Cascade Bicycle Club did put out an advocacy action alert in June supporting the Strauss amendment among others.
Josh Brower, attorney for the appellant group that has successfully trapped the trail in an endless series of court battles, sent out a press release celebrating the news.
“After 20 years of successfully protecting working-class Ballard, we are on the way to a real solution to the Missing Link, together with a strong group of common-sense supporters who are truly dedicated to real transit equity and safety,” said Brower in the press release.
While bike orgs have not been overly supportive of the Leary/Market idea, they also have not been fighting it. Cascade Bicycle Club’s stance has so far been that they support bike safety on Leary and Market, but not at the expense of the preferred and designed Shilshole trail route. Seattle Bike Blog praised parts of the very early design, especially the traffic calming elements on Leary Way, but the recently-released 30% designs show that many major issues have not been addressed.
The biggest concern is that the trail route constantly mixes with busy commercial sidewalks in downtown Ballard rather than keeping people biking and walking separated. This design would make the pedestrian experience worse and would lead to constant conflicts between people biking and walking. Protected bike lane design best practices exist for a reason, but the current design largely ignores them. Yes, they keep calling it a “multi-use trail,” but to actual users on the ground that distinction is purely academic. In busy commercial areas, you gotta keep the modes separated, including at intersections, and the biking route needs to be continuous.
If done well, this trail could see large numbers of people on bikes daily, but those numbers will balloon dramatically on those peak Golden Gardens days. The project needs to be designed to handle high volumes of people on bikes without negatively impacting the sidewalk environment, otherwise it will fail. People should be able to hang out on the sidewalk on Market Street without worrying someone might come through on a bike, and people biking should be able to ride this route without having to constantly deal with people wandering into the path.
CM Strauss’s argument is that they are just extending a design that already exists just west of 24th Ave NW on a stretch that for legal reasons the city is not allowed to call a trail (it is not even included on the official Seattle bike map). He’s right that it seems to work well enough now. It is also far less busy than the downtown core of Ballard, and the mixing zones near the intersections are all smaller and less complicated than what is planned near Leary and Market. Still, the best sections of the not-a-trail are separated from the sidewalk, and it all fits because the roadway has a traffic-calming design with one through lane in each direction rather than two.
The good news is that, as these existing segments demonstrate, there is enough space on Market Street to create high-quality, safe and comfortable biking and walking spaces simply by repurposing one of the four traffic lanes. Since we know Seattle streets with multiple lanes in the same direction are more deadly, reducing the number of lanes in this extremely walkable part of the neighborhood is a good idea on its own merits. SDOT can create a street with separate and comfortable sidewalk and biking spaces while also improving the safety for everyone using or crossing Market Street. A safer and higher-quality design could go a long way to convincing safe streets advocates to get on board, and it might also allow the city to keep the existing trees (I’m not entirely against cutting down trees if it is truly necessary to make a street better and safer, but SDOT should try not to if possible). Below is a quick and dirty sketch of what I mean.
As we noted in our previous deep dive into the early design, traffic volumes on Market Street drop dramatically west of 15th Ave NW. This street only carries 10,300 vehicles per day, which is about a third of what it carries east of 15th. In urban traffic volume terms, 10,000 is nothing. However, it is very important to keep the buses on time and reliable. The current design has bus lanes in each direction that disappear at many intersections. Using in-lane bus stops may be as good or better for bus reliability than bus lanes that transform into car-clogged turn lanes, though I am not a traffic engineer and I know this area is really weird and complicated. Still, I trust in SDOT’s traffic engineering team to come up with a solution that keeps busses moving reliably using the space of three traffic lanes.
I look forward to enthusiastically supporting a high-quality biking and walking connection on Market and Leary. But it’s going to require a significant rework of the 30% design to get there. Will SDOT go back and nail the design? Will it open without anyone once again going back on their word by suing it into oblivion? If it gets built and works well, I’ll happily take the L on the fight for a trail on Shilshole. Well, at least until Seattle some day gets the opportunity to tear out the rails and build the trail on the rail bed.
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