UW Transportation worked on the trail, not SDOT. UW owns and maintains that section of trail.

"And that was the end of this American life."

I love Mudede's Morning News.

I "qualified" to buy a house but the associated insurance and fee tack-ons for FHA an other options made it impossible to afford. You still have to have a 5-figure down payment to get a "regular" mortgage and who the hell can save that kind of money?

Ugh. Do Seattle's self-defined capital-U 'Urbanists' even care to understand anything about urbanity?

There's a reason that the world's better cities are tearing down monstrous overpasses that send pedestrians hundreds of weather-exposed feet out of the way so as to spare drivers from having to acknowledge their existence.

Only in Seattle would anyone build such aerial overkill anew, declare it the primary access route to a billion-dollar subway investment 8 stories below ground (because that makes sense), place it all in a location with no streetscape to speak of, and then laud it as "the future" of urban anything!

*(The various interrelated fields of urban sociology, planning, and study have long demanded the patient exercise of evidence-based research that straddles the hard and soft sciences and is particularly attentive to how human psychology reacts to cues of the built environment. But apparently now it's just a stupid, meaningless one-word clique signifier in a Twitter bio.)

The suggestion that the speeding ticket was proximate cause for the death of a biker is sort of absurd.

The shaman woman and the acolyte were walking by the road. The shaman woman stopped and rolled a joint. As they were walking and smoking the joint, there was a horrible crash and explosion just ahead. The acolyte exclaimed " How wise of you to stop and roll the joint, By your action we were saved".

The shaman woman replied, " But I may have delayed us just long enough to walk into an even greater disaster!" The acolyte said in frustration... "How do you ever know which is the correct path?" "I don't know." said the shaman, " I just roll the joint to perfection.".

Think on that for a bit and have a nice day...;-S SSWW

@1) i should have known better. SDOT is incapable of any kind of magic. attribution fixed.

@5: have you been to the station yet? the overpass is the best solution to the conditions that AREN'T GOING TO CHANGE IN OUR LIFETIMES. montlake blvd. is not going away, and husky stadium needs to move 10s of 1,000s of people across it several times a year.

be realistic, not idealistic.

No, @8, the "best" solution would have been a more sensibly-located station.

The second-best solution would have been a primary underground egress that emerged on the west side of Montlake, which for a station at such depth would have been easily doable without adding to (and possibly reducing) both access time and construction cost.

The third-best solution would have been a goddamned crosswalk.

In fact, cities with far less egregiously located and exponentially better-patronized transit infrastructure have been replacing hare-brained mid-century skybridges with improved street-level access for years now.

But no one in Seattle seems to have gotten the memo.

Am sure glad anonymous commenters like d.p. are not designing our city for us.

@9"No, @8, the "best" solution would have been a more sensibly-located station."

Fair enough. Where would that be?

"The second-best solution would have been a primary underground egress that emerged on the west side of Montlake, which for a station at such depth would have been easily doable without adding to (and possibly reducing) both access time and construction cost."

No additional costs? Or savings, even (mercy!). I think you're on to something! I wonder if the people who planned the station gave that a thought? It's possible they did, you know. If only there was a way we could find out if they did.

In your Burke Gilman trail photo there's a bicyclist riding on the new pedestrian sidewalk. Ugh. (p.s. I'm both a cyclist and a pedestrian).

@2,

Same here.

The entire "Motorcyclist Killed" one was also pure Mudede.

#6- A perfect response.

@11

Fair enough. Where would that be?

The Ave.

@15: uh, you do know there's a station opening on Brooklyn and 43rd in 2021, right?

@3: "five-figure down payment"? More like six. Median home price is $513k and you need 20% down. Unless you wanna pay another $250/month (at least) for mortgage insurance.

It's a fucking nightmare out there.

Heaven forbid, @10!

You might wind up with a little more "Amsterdam" and a little less "General Motors Pavilion at the World's Fair".

After years and years and years of Seattle living, I still cannot understand the blind boosterism that insists incredible mediocrity (a poorly-designed subway carrying only 30,000 trips per day on its "most important segment that will ever be built") or outright badness (the Montlake overpass) becomes an epicenter of awesome simply by being in Seattle.

Do some damned research. Advocate with a healthy incredulity. Do better.

@15: it opens in 2021.

@9: yeah, I think an exit on the North side of Montlake would have been good, as well. and the Hospital side. maybe they will be added someday, but in the meantime, you still have Husky games, and bicycles that need to reach the Burke Gilman.

it's too bad you weren't in charge.

whoops, WEST side of Montlake.

@11 it had nothing to do with costs and everything to do with UW wanting to save 500 parking spaces in the Montlake Triangle garage (keep in mind that UW Station already sees 9,199 daily boardings).

Tack on to that the fact that UW has opposed any effort to introduce the necessary infrastructure for efficient multimodal access to the station (e.g. a pedestrian tunnel to UW Medicine or bus bays at the station itself), and what could have been an amazing regional transportation hub has ended up a poor final product. Expect similar shortsightedness when UW updates their master plan this fall.

When the U District station opens, providing students with a shorter walk to most parts of campus and better bus connections, the boardings at UW Station will reduce to a trickle.

@15

Another station is planned for 45th and 15th - one block from the "Ave".

But back to my point....I wonder if anyone bothered to think about these issues at all back when the stations were being planned. I mean if the Pacific Station is (according d.p. above) so poorly placed and designed that MUST be the explanation, amirite? I mean it wasn't as if no one was asking those questions long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. At http://www.seattle.gov/transportation I found a document from all the way back in deepest darkest 1997 which says this about the planned University stations (note the plural);

"...effective station and station area planning will require a coordinated effort by the community, the University, SeaTran, and King County Metro. Once the RTA design team begins its work, rapid and coordinated response to their proposals will be necessary, and in many ways, the land use and surface transportation issues will be more complex in terms related to increased volumes and transfers promise to be especially challenging.”

So yeah, maybe as d.p. says, no one in Seattle "got the memo" and in the intervening years no one thought to think these things through.

Or maybe some people here are talking out their bums.

@16, @19

Actually, I didn't. Cool. So that's what all those side streets off the Ave are blocked off!

@21: naw, there still be f-tons going to the med center and east campus. even just going from Brooklyn to the IMA.

@22 you missed my above response to this point you've now repeated, but good planning is the reason UW Station got built at all. If the university had had their way, there wouldn't be a station. And while the station we have today is better than nothing, it would have been nice if the better heads had had the power to overcome the university's foot-dragging and build something even better.

@25 sure, those will still draw a little traffic. But I think by about 2023, once people are used to the Brooklyn station, we'll see UW Station's numbers drop closer to those of the Rainier Valley corridor, except on game days.

The Med Center will be responsible for the majority of the daily boardings, which is all the more reason to build more efficient pedestrian connections between there and the station.

@26. I did miss it. Sometimes the threading here is borked. Like it'll say there are 10 posts under a story but when I open the comments I can only see five. Weird.

I often like Mr Mudede's writing at least a little, but the piece about the motorcyclist sounded, in its sententiousness, like pure Ed Wood Jr.

Pull the string!