SDOT should pilot Airport Way bike lanes in Georgetown and create a wider neighborhood-led circulation plan

Seattle has revolutionized biking to and from Georgetown this year, opening quality bike lanes and paths from the neighborhood north to Stadium Station and south to the South Park Bridge. However, there these excellent projects have left a glaring gap: Central Georgetown itself.

SDOT has funding to plan and create early design" concepts for a Georgetown bike route in 2027 and 2028, but there is currently no construction funding. However, a presentation to the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board all but confirmed what anyone who bikes around Georgetown already knows: Building bike lanes on Airport Way is the only real option. So let's break out the green paint and the puns to pilot a bike lane on Airport Way now, then invest planning funds to study the many other Georgetown street safety needs.

From an October presentation to the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board (PDF). The public does not own the land under the purple line, a Union Pacific railroad.

There is no other neighborhood like Georgetown in the city. The street layout in the heart of Georgetown makes even less sense than our city's standard of incomplete grids. The residential pockets of the neighborhood have recognizable street grids that are completely cut off from their primary business district thanks to I-5 freeway ramps. If you were trying to guard your business district from people biking and walking, you could hardly do a better job.

Today, there is no good way to bike from the Georgetown to South Park bike route, which ends around S Bailey Street, to the Georgetown to Downtown bike route, which starts at S Lucile Street. The least bad option for most people is probably to cross Airport Way at 13th Ave S and ride through the parking lots behind the commercial buildings on the east side of Airport Way. This route lets out near Corson Ave S about a block south of the Airport Way bridge, so riders still need to choose whether to bike on the often busy roadway or on the sidewalk. But the only other option is to bike the whole way on Airport Way itself, which can be very stressful and, as we saw Thursday evening, dangerous.

Ryan Packer reported that according to Seattle Fire Department radio, someone driving struck and hospitalized a person biking on or near Airport Way and Corson shortly after 9 p.m. We don't have any additional details at this time. We wish this person the best. The injury is a reminder of what is at stake as the city builds out a bike network and why closing gaps like these is so important.

SDOT's very early steps in planning a bike route through central Georgetown show that Airport Way is really the only viable option. The only other corridor that could maybe work someday is a rail corridor marked in purple on the map above. However, this rail line is still technically active, and the city does not own it. So maybe someday there could be a path next to the tracks there, but that should be considered a totally different project. It is listed as a lower-priority tier 2 catalyst project" in the Seattle Transportation Plan, and the city would likely need to buy or lease land from Union Pacific as well as get their approval. As we've learned too many times, anything involving a railroad can take forever and easily get bogged down in court. Even if the railroad decides to abandon the line entirely some day, maybe the community vision for the future of that unique railroad space won't even be a bike route.

We don't need to spend years studying this area to see that Airport Way is the only viable bike route option available to the city today. This conclusion isn't even news to SDOT. Airport Way protected bike lanes have been in city plans since at least the 2014 Bicycle Master Plan and were again listed in the 2024 Seattle Transportation Plan. The 2024 plan also includes protected bike lanes on Corson Ave, though that is likely a much higher-budget project (could be awesome!) and would still require about a block of bike lanes on Airport Way to connect to the bridge.

The good news is that there is space on Airport Way to quickly build a bike connection using lower-cost materials. The roadway has a nonsensical asymmetrical design with one lane southbound and two lanes northbound. The Airport Way bridge over the railyard to the north of Georgetown has already been redesigned to have one lane in each direction, so the city would just need to extend that basic design south through the business district. Making the road one lane in each direction would free up the space needed for bike lanes while also dramatically improving the crosswalks and, therefore, bus stop access within Georgetown.

So my suggestion to Seattle leaders is to acknowledge that Airport Way is the only viable option for a bike connection and do a quick build there. Then instead of spending time and money studying a bike connection, invest in creating a more encompassing Georgetown neighborhood circulation plan. This could be a chance for residents and business operators to get their intra-Georgetown needs down on paper in a city plan. For example, it could develop community ideas about how a path along the rail line could work if that corridor becomes available. It could also identify ideas for better connections between residential areas and the business district (maybe a traffic signal at the Orcas/Doris intersection with Corson?). I'm sure neighbors will have a lot of ideas to tell the city about stressful crossings and needed connections. WSDOT may even have a role to play in such a plan since so many of the challenges for Georgetown residents are caused by state highways and connections to those highways. The bike lane is probably the easiest part since, well, there's only one real option.