No Bike Lanes

According to Brian Dougherty, a Georgetown neighborhood activist who sits on the board for the city's nascent bicycle master plan, the mayor's office has ordered planners to scratch the bike lanes once plotted along Airport Way, leaving Georgetown without a direct bike-friendly link to the city center.

"That's right; Georgetown once again is getting the short end of the stick," Dougherty wrote in an e-mail. "Airport Way will get no improvements, while the city spends millions building dedicated bike lanes and trails in other neighborhoods." City department of transportation spokesman Gregg Hirakawa said the plan is preliminary at this point. Public meetings will be held on December 5 at Odd Fellows Hall in Ballard, and on December 7 at the Rainier Community Center—both at 6:30 p.m. ANGELA VALDEZ

No Wal-Marts

There are still no Wal-Marts within the city limits of Seattle. But after saturating the countryside and the outer-ring burbs, America's largest employer is looking to populate city centers. Several Portland neighborhoods have already waged little wars to block planned invasions and, according to a local union, Seattle should get ready for the fight.

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21 is gearing up for a special holiday edition of an ongoing national campaign aimed at forcing the behemoth to change its business practices. The push got its start November 21 at a press event at the Garfield Community Center. As part of Hope for the Holidays, expect press conferences (organized around cheery themes like Wal-Mart's treatment of Latinos and African Americans); radio ads in Spanish and English (with factoids like the number of years it would take the average Wal-Mart worker to earn the CEO's salary: 1,000); and, if you're lucky, a protest or two at your friendly, non-neighborhood (yet) Wal-Mart.

UFCW organizer Steve Lansing says the union's project is "a long-term attempt to change the business practices of a company, as opposed to a more case-by-case effort." ANGELA VALDEZ

No Freeway

Tear down a massive elevated freeway and perpetually gridlocked commuter route without building another freeway to replace it?

Insanity! Mayor Nickels says.

Madness! the state department of transportation chimes.

Folly! the city council insists.

But they did it in Seoul, where a six-lane elevated freeway that carried 160,000 cars a day was demolished—reversing "one of the most comprehensive obliterations of the natural environment ever perpetrated"—and replaced with a five-mile-long, 800-yard-wide lateral park along the route of the river the freeway had displaced.

The idea of closing down the freeway, called the Cheonggyecheon after the river it replaced, initially met with fierce and widespread opposition; people simply couldn't believe the city could survive without the road. "Ordinary people were a bit skeptical to start with, but then when they saw the river reappear, they got very excited," planner Kee Yeon Hwang said.

The city didn't just tear down the road; they improved bus service and gave people other options to avoid the city's freeways, with surprising results: "As soon as we destroyed the road, the cars just disappeared and drivers changed their habits. A lot of people just gave up their cars. Others found a different way of driving."

Here in Seattle, the naysayers continue to have sway over the debate about how to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, with their endless chorus of "it could never work here." Everywhere else, meanwhile, it does. ERICA C. BARNETT