Seattle’s newest bikeway is wide, smooth, flat and has very few points of conflict, a set of rare characteristics that nearly always add up to a huge success for a new bike route in this notoriously hilly city. The only reason the new trail along the northeast side of Alaskan Way is not packed with people biking is that, well, there’s already a very nice bikeway on the southwest side closer to the water that does not require two street crossings to access.
My test ride along the path Tuesday, just hours after it officially opened, was not the best test of its utility. Many people probably don’t even know it is open yet, for one. And the path will get a lot of use on days when the cruise terminal closes the existing Alaskan Way bikeway during busy ship-loading hours. During peak season, there are as many as five sailing days per week, and the compromise between the city, bike advocates, and the Port of Seattle allows the Port to detour the bikeway across the street and away from the chaos of loading in front of the cruise terminal.
However, the new path is much more than just a bikeway detour. It replaces the defunct waterfront streetcar tracks with a walking and biking path that will be very nice for accessing hotels, businesses and homes along the northeast side of Alaskan Way. It connects from Pier 62 near the aquarium almost to Myrtle Edwards Park and the sculpture park. The catch is that users will need to cross the street to get there, and most people will just stay on the waterfront side of the street unless they have a reason to cross.
It is odd that we went so many decades without any safe places to bike along the Alaskan Way waterfront, and now suddenly there are two. The city would not have prioritized two bikeways across the street from each other, but the new path was a privately-funded initiative led by Melinda French Gates, MacKenzie Scott and others as part of the Elliott Bay Connections project that is also remaking Myrtle Edwards and Centennial Parks.
The situation is a bit awkward for bike advocates and the city since it looks like an imbalanced distribution of bike investments since there are plenty of places in the city that don’t even have one good bikeway. In the same vein, Seattle Parks has a lot of park investment needs across the city that they would surely have put ahead of rebuilding Myrtle Edwards Park, which was already pretty nice. But the Bruce Harrell administration decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and later this year we can have philosophical debates about private-public partnerships over a hot drink around the fire pit in front of the new concessions building in Centennial Park.
One small change I suggest is adding a third arrow to this bike dot on the crossing nearest to Pier 62. I think it is technically there to guide people to use the crosswalk if they want to cross, but I don’t understand why it wouldn’t also point north. For folks biking, it looks like it is saying they need to turn and use the new path, which isn’t true.
Another issue is that there isn’t anywhere to wait if you want to cross from the waterside bikeway to the new one. This is another reason why people biking are much more likely to just stay on the water side. This is an issue with most bike routes that requires crossing the street, which is why bike advocates fought so hard for a compromise that would keep the bikeway on the waterside as much as possible.