Comments

1
The bums, hobos, crackheads and their dealers are gonna love it!
2

A: "You park your car and walk into the park."

B: "Seattle needs to find the strength to say no to cars"

So people shouldn't go to parks?
3
Nicely stated, Charles.
4
I'd like to know how many 911 emergencies were made worse because of the longer travel time from the 4th and Battery fire station during the nine months it took to build that glorified sidewalk.

It added four blocks to their trip whenever they had to respond to the northwest, which is a big deal when there's traffic and seconds matter.
5
You do not drive a car through a park. You park your car and walk into the park.

You realize that cars do in fact drive through almost all of Seattle's best parks - Volunteer, Discovery, Arboretum, etc. Even Central Park in NYC has roads.

You should get out often.
6
Two observations. First, Bell Street isn't Seattle's first woonerf. That was in the Cascade neighborhood, if I recall correctly. And several more are a-coming, from 12th Ave on Cap Hill to SLU.

But there's one woonerf in Seattle that no one mentions: Pike Place. Delivery trucks, vans full of tourists, private cars, bikes, and lots & lots of pedestrians. Crowded, sure; bustling, sure, but I've never heard a honking horn on Pike Place.
7
Charles doesn't give a fuck about emergency vehicles.
8
It has become a shitshow to ride your bike through now. There are no sharrows or lane markings for cars, and because of a slight bend in the road, cars are misaligned and take up the whole road. It feels particularly unsafe and confusing for motorists and cyclists alike.
9
If that's a park, then we can play soccer in it, right? So if people are playing soccer in the park on Bell Street, then the cars need to find some other place to drive, right? If not, then Charles is right. It's just a slow road for cars.
10
closing streets to make pedestrian spaces is also bad urbanism. See Occidental Park, Pine at Westlake.

there's a spot available downtown for an amazing urban park - the empty block across from City Hall.

Courthouse Park should be great as well; instead it's a permanent homeless encampment that no one else wants anything to do with.

11
@6 - ...And they should fucking ban cars from Pike Place Market! So, so stupid that people are allowed to drive down there. Delivery vehicles only.
12
Yes. I bike through there every day and the redisign has just made it worse. Pedestrians now ignore the crosswalks, the cars don't slow down and now they interact more with the bikes as they avoid the zig zags they are supposed to be doing.
13
@10 - It's a homeless encampment because our society is unwilling to solve the problems of homelessness. Not because there's anything wrong with the park-space itself.
14
In the end, it's an experiment. Rarely do we get these things perfect on the first few tries.

They should have just called it Bell Street Woonerf and not hype it to be something it's not. Visually and spatially it's a great improvement over what was there before, and as a pedestrian it is great E-W access through Belltown. It slows cars down without disrupting the street grid for commercial and emergency vehicles. The outdoor dining possibilities are a good thing for the urban environment as well - maybe once restaurants start setting up tables along that route, I'll see fewer episodes like the 2:00 PM Sunday street brawl that took place on Bell between 2nd & 3rd a couple weeks ago.
15
@6, @11, Pike Place is Seattle's greatest street. Every street should be like that. Ban cars? Why? There's never been a car heading down that street in a hundred years that didn't immediately regret it, as they sat creeping along at 0.1 MPH for the next hour.

There's a woonerf in Greenwood too, that was opened to great fanfare some years ago. It's hilariously full of shit -- they got all sorts of cred for their forward thinking, but it's a frigging parking lot. The shops along it are still, almost a decade later, empty, except for a Christian coffeehouse (Green Bean, really nice people but anti-gay, don't go there).

Woonerf might be a useful concept in Denmark or wherever but in the US it translates as "bullshit".

This one here is less bullshit than most BECAUSE it's a street, not a park. A "slow street for cars" is actually a good thing, better than a park, certainly. Parks are for the most part unutilized the vast majority of the time. Properly used streets provide places for cars and people. Parks are dead zones, and pedestrian-only spaces are city-killing yuppie fantasies. Remember the 60s and 70s, when every city in America pedestrianized vast swathes of its downtown, only to watch it wither and die almost immediately. There are thousands of them; the only ones that have ever come back to life are the ones that were reopened to cars.

The idea isn't "no cars", it's "don't let cars rule".
16
@Hernandez: voice of reason, you are.

Real world street design changes are brutally tough to effect. People like Charles provide political cover to push harder against the dominance of motor vehicles. So the solutions often reflect real world compromises: better than before, but not good enough for the vanguard, or the Charleses of the world.

The next project can be more radical, now that people see the sky hasn't fallen. And the one after that even more so. Change happens incrementally in a democracy, as much as the rest of wish the world would just suck it up and get over the car already.
17
Charles, it isn't an either-or proposition.

Yes, we need spaces that are only for pedestrians, but they need to be thoughtfully situated to be sure there is enough foot traffic, visibility and activation to make them successful...Dead ped malls across the country speak to the failure of simply removing vehicular traffic without considering the urban context. And we also need a robust grid of attractive downtown streets (as proposed in the Pike Pine Renaissance) for all sorts of reasons...mobility, a vibrant economy, etc.

But let's also leave room for new hybrids like Bell Street Park that achieve many (though of course not all) of the benefits of both. Day to day, there will be lots more opportunities for people of all backgrounds to spend time in the street together...sitting, eating and socializing. And at the opening party and a series of weekend days this summer, blocks can be closed to vehicles to provide great venue for the community to hold special events...pop-up playgrounds, music festivals, art and craft fairs, Oktoberfest, or whatever new uses of the space the creative people of Belltown will imagine.

Bell Street Park may not fit everyone's personal definition of either a street or a park, but let's chill a little on the semantics and see what we can make of this new kind of space.
18
Charles, it isn't an either-or proposition.

Yes, we need spaces that are only for pedestrians, but they need to be thoughtfully situated to be sure there is enough foot traffic, visibility and activation to make them successful...Dead ped malls across the country speak to the failure of simply removing vehicular traffic without considering the urban context. And we also need a robust grid of attractive downtown streets (as proposed in the Pike Pine Renaissance) for all sorts of reasons...mobility, a vibrant economy, etc.

But let's also leave room for new hybrids like Bell Street Park that achieve many (though of course not all) of the benefits of both. Day to day, there will be lots more opportunities for people of all backgrounds to spend time in the street together...sitting, eating and socializing. And at the opening party and a series of weekend days this summer, blocks can be closed to vehicles to provide a great venue for the community to hold special events...pop-up playgrounds, music festivals, art and craft fairs, Oktoberfest, or whatever new uses of the space the creative people of Belltown will imagine.

Bell Street Park may not fit everyone's personal definition of either a street or a park, but let's chill a little on the semantics and see what we can make of this new kind of space.
19
This is definitely not regressive. Turning streets into places where pedestrians don't have to worry about being run over by cars while they shop or eat at restaurants is a step in the right direction, and we should have a lot more streets like that. The problem is with parks. They're fine, but we should be thinking less about creating giant parks and how to drive/park the car in order to walk there, and more about how we can have real, economically viable spaces, the streets themselves, as pedestrian and bike friendly. We don't need parks by the freeway, which is an extreme example of what I'm hearing when I read that we need parks that we can drive, park and walk to.
20
@15,

I would be grateful for getting traffic the hell out of Pike Place in the summer where the sidewalks and the market itself is so packed with people it's impossible to get anywhere. It would be one thing if it were possible to get around the tourists by going up or down a block, but that's a tad inconvenient given the steep slope up to First.
21
I drive through the Market EVERY DAY, around 8:30 a.m. But I'm not dumb enough to drive through it on a summer Saturday.

@13: no, there is something wrong with it other than that. the long ago courthouse remodel, exacerbated by 9/11, turned its back on the park. what was historically the entry is the loading dock now. the trees are too large and too numerous, and low-income housing adjoins the park on 2 sides. it's not inviting. in the least. it needs an update.
22
I can only imagine these complaints about emergency vehicles emanate from the suburbs where it takes 5 minutes to wind your way out of the housing development and onto the main road.

I've spent 95% of my time in the core the past 10 years. It has been my observation that anything with a siren and flashing lights moves just fine. Even during rush hour. Even on the lovely new Bell street.
23
A woonerf is still a street, not a park. Don't call it a park - it's a street where people live, by definition. (Incidentally, a shopping street with a similar blending of modes is called a "winkelerf" - that's Pike Place.)

Successful woonerven and winkelerven usually exist between arterial roads but are not tempting through-routes. For this reason, they don't usually exist in the city's central street grid. I haven't seen "Bell Street Park" but the name itself betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept.
24
Cornichon @6 and Fnarf @15, yes! Pike Place is the most joyful street we have. On rare occasions when I'm ambling down that street I will hear someone honk, and it is such a huge pleasure as a pedestrian to stroll right up to their car window and give them the frowning of a lifetime.
25
Fairview Ave East is also designated as a woonerf
26
Woonerf? Woonerven? Winkelerven? Silliest words ever.
27
If nothing else, it will at least be a good experiment.
28
I like the concept to get cars to slow the hell down, and/or cede the road to pedestrians and bicyclists.

There's way too much bitching in this city. Is Bell Street better than it was before?

Yes.

For my part, they could transform every street into a woonerf. And for the idiot above who thinks its a stupid name, it's from a foreign language, dumbass.
29
Closing down Kelley's did more for that corner than an extra wide sidewalk and some cheap landscaping ever will.
30
There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what a woonerf is. In a woonerf, pedestrians and bicycles always have the legal right of way over cars. Pike Place does not qualify, as cars still have the right of way outside of crosswalks (to my knowledge). You can play soccer on a woonerf, and there is jack the cars can do about it. Woonerf are not slow streets for cars. They are streets that the cars can use when nobody else is using them, by definition. If there is so much as an alley cat on the street, the car is SOL.

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