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/
Some shades or trees will improve this place even more.
Looks like a fucking european street
Lol wtf. I’ve lived in Seattle most of my life now, and have known Pike Place Market since I first moved here in the early 90s. And that strip of road down there NEVER should have been a road. Seattle needs to just mark it off and have it be foot traffic only.
That also being said, there’s something to it though, being crammed on the sidewalk in the pouring rain, alongside a million other people on this tiny little sidewalk, around all the various hidden and famous shops and importers.
I don’t think anybody actually thought closing the road from car traffic would negatively affect the market. You’d have to be a vitriolic idiot to actually believe that. That’s like saying having a bus service Disneyland would make people less likely to go. It just doesn’t make sense.
Yeah, I live in Seattle and have been to Pike Place many a time. Having cars down there was fucking deranged. Neither the pedestrians nor the drivers could possibly have been happy about the situation.
There’s a street in my city with many major shops. Big clothing chains and such. A couple of years ago it was suggested to make it a pedestrian zone and the ones crying the loudest were the shop owners. Noone will buy anything if they can’t stop their car directly in front of the shop! And all the old people with multiple hip surgeries, who CAN’T come if the taxi can’t let them out right in front of the shop and who are the main customer base!!!
Well, anyway, it’s been a pedestrian zone for two years now and I’ve never seen so many people in the shops before. You can’t find a place to sit in the restaurants and cafés now on saturdays when before they were half full at best. Funnily enough after all the headlines and screaming on facebook about how the pedestrian zone will KILL all business, it’s become pretty quiet. You won’t read news headlines about the success of the pedestrian zone.
So many parking spaces wasted! Now small businesses will suffer 😢
Tap for spoiler
/s
And look, nobody in the shops, everybody’s just walking there! /s (It do need more trees tho.)
It really needs more trees, dang.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think its a PNW thing. Portland area is like that as well.
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.
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. 🤷♂️
fucking finally. Pike Market has always been too crowded for cars anyway
No ones shopping, there are all walking about having a good time /s
So the argument was “if we make it walkable, people will stop coming here”?
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
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.
oh nice, they pedestrianized pike place market? that place is famous, there’s textbooks in asia that tell about it, part of the colonial cultural education bullshit that comes with compulsory English education. learn all about a bunch of American cities
