There is now a complete and connected protected bike lane on Pine Street from Melrose Ave to 1st Ave. It addresses the awful intersection with Boren Ave and as of this past week includes a bike lane through the brick-paved section near Westlake Park.

The change is part of the larger Pike Pine Streetscape and Bicycle Improvements project with half the funding coming from the city of Seattle and the waterfront lid and half from a set of investments that neighbors won as part of the Washington State Convention Center expansion.

There is now a painted line through the crosswalk area directing people on bikes to the new curbside bike lane. A row of planter boxes separates the bike lane from a handful of on-street parking spaces for loading or taxis only. During my observations, these spaces were mostly being used by people making deliveries, though uses will change during other times of day.

The new design addresses an issue through this brick section where there was space for multiple lanes of traffic but no lane lines or rules to control use of the space. So if there were a backup of cars waiting to turn right onto 4th Ave, for example, people heading straight would merge to the left to go around them. The problem is that people biking were also trying to use that left “lane,” leading to conflicts and scary close calls. Under the new design, people on bikes can fully avoid the merging issue, which feels much more comfortable. I’m not sure I would have felt comfortable letting my 1st grader ride through here on her own bike under the previous design, but now I would. That’s the power of all-ages-and-abilities bike lanes, if a first grader can comfortably do it then so can most other people.

Bike riders will need to look out more closely for people crossing the street, especially if they walk between the parked cars. Visibility is reduced as a tradeoff in the new design, an issue that can only be fixed by either restricting or removing the loading zones. Hopefully this proves to not be an issue, but it’s worth observing closely in these initial weeks to see if adjustments are needed.

I am cautiously optimistic about this new section, which relies on the planter boxes staying in place or being reset quickly whenever a car or truck nudges them. As Seattle has seen with other planter boxes and smurf turds, these plastic planter boxes are often light enough that people’s poor or careless parking jobs can easily nudge them into the bike lane, but they are heavy enough to make it difficult for a person to move them back just by pushing. A 2022 presentation to the Seattle Design Commission showed images of sturdier concrete or stone planters, but the planter boxes currently installed appear to be plastic. Hopefully this is not an issue, but the team should observe them closely and be prepared to make a change if they prove to be prone to displacement. We summed up the lesson of Seattle’s smurf turds back in 2016:

The lesson here isn’t so much about public art, but more about understanding and anticipating people’s parking abilities. Without a curb to give people feedback that they’ve gone too far, anything in the buffer space between the bikeway and parked cars will get hit over and over.

It’s great to see downtown’s Pine Street protected bike lane finally get completed after the initial sections opened six years ago. We have been calling for a bike lane through the Westlake Park area since the day the bike lane first opened back in 2017. The current solution is what we suggested as a possible low-cost solution. Here’s what we wrote then:

There’s also the problem of how to deal with the brick-paved section through Westlake. While the bricks are supposed to create something of an undefined, slower-speed mixed traffic space between 5th and 4th Avenues, the right “lane” through the block is nearly always occupied by backed-up cars trying to turn right on 4th. So any buses or people driving who want to continue straight have to merge left. Unfortunately, that’s also where people biking are directed after crossing at the new bike signal at 5th Ave.

I’m not sure it is dangerous, since traffic is generally moving slower there, but it isn’t very comfortable and it’s certainly not a solution for people of all ages and abilities, the standard the city should be striving to achieve. […]

Any solution on Pine will need significant changes to the brick section between 5th and 4th Avenues. This might include changing curb bulbs and/or creating a barrier of some kind to separate a bike lane from general purpose traffic. There may be a low-cost solution (a barrier of planter boxes?), but I’m not certain.

This block is just one part of a larger project redesigning Pike and Pine Streets between Melrose and 1st Ave. Stay tuned for more about some of the other areas, including some significant issues on the Melrose end. But for now I wanted to celebrate this section of Pine Street, which has been a long time coming and fixes some of the most persistent challenges for people trying to bike west from Capitol Hill through downtown. I mean, the Boren intersection, y’all, it’s so much better. I’ll never have to squeeze between those two traffic lanes ever again.

As a reminder of how we got here, check out this 2019 video we made featuring Brie Gyncild of Central Seattle Greenways: