This summer, for the first time, Seattle banned cars in the Pike Place Market :
Last year (2024), some politicians said no one will shop here anymore if it’s pedestrianized :
https://publicola.com/2024/04/02/dont-open-pike-place-to-pedestrians-council-member-urges/
Wait, people think that people want to drive in Seattle? Lol fuck that shit. Worst road layouts I’ve ever seen, terrible traffic, and a good light rail and bus system.
I tried to drive in Seattle one time about 15 years ago. As far as I can tell, the lane markers and other road paint in Seattle must be designed to become completely invisible as soon as the road gets wet. And it’s wet a lot.
I think its a PNW thing. Portland area is like that as well.
Driving in Seattle is basically commuting on nightmare difficulty.
Iron man mode, permadeath, of course, lol
https://youtube.com/watch?v=C56ZLKceTPI
The I5 Union Street exit is basically a literal meme for how often people not from Seattle eat shit trying to take it too fast, or when its wet (which is often).
Doesn’t help that the signs and lanes are confusing as fuck, and also no one will ever let you merge.
The only people that use to drive through there were tourists that put the location in their GPS and then got stuck.
Them and delivery/Uber drivers.
Ugh. The amount of Uber drivers that actually dropped people off in the middle of Pike Plac was infuriating.
So … short version of history:
Seattle was not originally ‘Seattle’.
It was a bunch of different smaller towns, all nearby each other, that grew outward toward each other.
As a result, there were many differently oriented street grid layouts… that roughly all smashed into each other at downtown/pioneer square.
The… the meeting where multiple proponents of different street grids, basically mayors of the smaller but now merging towns… where they were supposed to agree on how to make a unified system?
Literally devolved into a a brawl, a melee.
… That’s why Seattle’s street layout fundamentally makes no sense.
That and the pretty extreme terrain. Try walking all the way up Pike or Pine, from Pike Place Market, all the way up to Capitol Hill.
Steep grades, lots of hills.
Check out the Seattle Underground tour if you want a more comprehensive explanation of this batshittery, lol.
Ok that explains some of it but also no seriously Jesus fucking shit its hell to drive. I’ve heard amazing things about the tour.
But yeah I really don’t buy that grade is that big of an issue when it’s a few blocks from the Westlake station. The city is absolutely hilly as hell and that can be exhausting, but anything close to the rail line isn’t that bad. If it were next to the space needle I’d agree though.
Walk up from Pike Place Market on uh, Lenora, or Blanchard.
I swear its almost a 30 degree incline.
I remember back in the 08 snowstorm seeing a city bus literally dangling a 1/3rd of its length over I5, having skid down a steep road in Capitol hill and not being able to totally stop in time.
Finally, if you want a fucking incline, go walk up to the top of Queen Anne from the Science Center.
You might as well be climbing a mountain.
Yeah I remember my underground tour guide referring to one particular area known as Profanity Hill due to how hard it was to climb it on foot. The city’s an amazing place to walk around despite the shitty street layouts.
I still find the Denny regrade astounding.
Basically:
Fuck this hill in particular, blast it with high powered hoses and pumps, then use the dirt from the hill to make pioneer square more level.
Like… the parts of the actual underground… those were originally street level, they just buried the roads and buildings in roughly a story or two ish of dirt…
…and while they were doing this, you still had the doors to these buildings at original street level, that people could walk into on the sidewalks… with scaffold/retaining walls for the new roads.
I had heard that a worker or two fell off the… new, raised street, onto the original street level sidewalks.
Seattle is, and always has been, an urban design clownshow.
Though they have made a lot of good progress with the lightrail expansions and reworkings of various public areas.
I’ve bicycled Denny. It’s a great workout.
fucking finally. Pike Market has always been too crowded for cars anyway
Looks like a fucking european street
A lot of traffic came from people passing through in their cars just because Google Maps said so. It’s stupid to clog up a social area in most cities.
I didn’t see any changes over Pride weekend 6/29. Cars still turn off of first onto Pike. I wasn’t in this lower / outer corner of the market though. 🤷♂️
Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Where will all the cars park? Won’t anybody think of the poor cars?
So the argument was “if we make it walkable, people will stop coming here”?
The absolutely baffling thing is that that one particular stretch of road has been being shut down to car traffic for various events for like… decades.
Its very widely a social faux pas to drive on that street during busy market hours, becsause it has always been full of pedestrians without it even being blocked off, again, for decades.
They’ll regularly have overflow marker stalls, or just functionally limit it to market stall shopkeeps unloading or packing up their stuff.
The only people who would be against this like 1/8 of a mile of road that is nearly always swarming with people just finally being formally classed as ‘no cars’ are fucking idiots and/or obscenely privileged suburbanites who cannot understand the concept of walking.
There is literally a (or multiple) parking garage(s) under the Market. You can park in it, and emerge just literally in the Market.
https://www.pikeplacemarket.org/parking-directions/
Its just that it doesn’t work so well for modern, literally larger than a WW2 M4 Sherman tank, automobiles.
If you wanna zip around Seattle and actually be able to park, get a subcompact.
It can be done, I’ve done it, for a decade.
Your F-350 is shit outta luck though.
Yep, that is indeed what it boils down to because it’s a major tourist attraction for people coming in to visit Seattle. So the city councilperson argued that it would reduce people visiting if they had to park far away.
Glad to see they were wrong.
I’ve been to Seattle twice and we went to the market both times. We always walked from our hotel bc there’s quite a few hotels in that area (almost like it’s a hot tourist area) but even when we wanted to go somewhere further away, we just either used public transit or those rentable scooter things. Also the first time we went to pike place market like 4 years ago or something cars kept trying to drive around the crowd and it made everything so much worse. I swear some people have forgotten that not using a car is an option, even when they only want to go somewhere a block away
Nice to hear, I visited a while back and barely even remember cars because it seems so impractical for that area. It’s already so very walkable, high density shopping area (with lovely food).
oh my god they pedestrianized Pike Place?? that’ll make it a thousand times nicer, i hope they don’t gentrify-out that really good random dim sum street food place with the huge bao
They definitely won’t, the prices will just go up to match the rents. Last time I was there the line was insanely long, raising prices certainly wouldn’t deter the majority of their customers.
The market is owned by the city and managed by the market council, public ownership keeps the rent low for the small businesses that operate there!
The cars there were always a joke. It was always some poor sucker of a tourist who didn’t know what it was and would take half an hour to go three blocks dodging all the tourists.
Yes, even if you could legally drive in Pike’s Place, for all intents and purposes, you might as well say that you couldn’t drive there before. Those politicians who said nobody would shop there were either lying through their teeth or completely uninformed.
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Oh fuck I didn’t hear about this! Now I actually want to go back to Pike Place Market. I haven’t been in ages because of the fucking cars
Some shades or trees will improve this place even more.
Carbrains have one refrain: economic harm. As if driving any distance longer than a football field is more convenient than a walkable/bikeable city with good public transit for longer hauls.
So glad they did this. I made a wrong turn once when I first moved here and drove down the road accidentally. Blocking it off just helps everyone.
