Latest Leary/Market ‘Burke-Gilman Trail’ concept still mixes biking and walking on busy sidewalks + Comments due July 15

A few weeks ago, I walked the route of Councilmember Dan Strauss's proposed trail along Leary Avenue NW and NW Market Street with a group of dedicated walking and biking advocates from Ballard-Fremont Green Streets and Cascade Bicycle Club. We had a printout of the recently-released 60% design to reference as well as a measuring tape to fully get a sense of what it would be like if it were completed. I wanted to ground-truth concerns about the design that Seattle Bike Blog and others voiced during the previous design phase that have gone unchanged in the latest version. If anything, walking the route with a tape measure only made the issues appear worse.

SDOT is seeking feedback through a simple four-question form. Comments are due July 15.

A regional multi-use trail that mixes with very busy sidewalks in the heart of the Ballard business district is nonsense. There are very good reasons why the best cycling cities, including the best examples in our own city, separate walking and biking spaces in busy areas. The proposed design would create a barely functional bike route while also making a good pedestrian environment worse. Ballard deserves better. Many people, including Seattle Bike Blog, provided clear feedback in 2024 about why mixing the trail and busy business district sidewalks will not work, and the latest designs seemingly ignored that feedback. City leaders should demand a redo of the 60% design that separates walking and biking spaces according to best practices for modern protected bike lanes, because the current proposal is way off the mark and does not seem to be getting better.

All of this is happening as the city's legal quest to build the Burke-Gilman Trail on Shilshole has failed again, this time at the WA Court of Appeals. There is little reason to believe that the Shilshole trail is close to being completed, and the status quo for people trying to bike to and through Ballard is untenable and dangerous. A quality bike route on Leary and Market would be great even if it is not the Burke-Gilman Trail. Regardless of any other context, these streets should be safe because all streets should be safe, and forming a connection option for trail users would be a big win. But it needs to be done right.

The Leary/Market project team and the city's leadership need to take one big step back and think about the bigger picture of how Leary and Market can work better for everyone in the neighborhood. The focus is too narrowly centered on building a multi-use trail as the solution. Get rid of the word trail" and instead design these streets to be the best they can be using the full set of tools available. People on the ground do not care at all if something is a multi-use trail or a sidewalk next to a protected bike lane, they just care if they can get to and through the area safely and comfortably. That means moving along the streets, but it also means crossing the streets and hanging out on the sidewalks. Ballard has a good-but-not-great pedestrian environment, and the outdated and dangerous multi-lane designs of Leary and Market are the biggest impediments that are holding back the area's full potential.

Image from the project webpage. Crossing improvements like these are highlights in the proposed design.

As in the 2024 design, the best parts of the project are still the Leary Ave safe streets and crosswalk improvements. The exact details are a bit off in places, but the overall concept is strong. That street is unnecessarily wide and fast, forming a barrier through the neighborhood. A complete street with safe crosswalks and bike lanes and proper loading zones for businesses and homes that need them (such as the Ballard Landmark senior living building) would be an amazing improvement for the neighborhood. The current trail concept for Leary is lacking due to constant sidewalk mixing zones, but it's not too hard to imagine changes to make it great by properly separating the biking and walking spaces and using the reclaimed road space to also improve walking areas. It is worth noting that the proposed changes not in sync with the still-in-construction Route 40 project, which is a bit awkward and will certainly lead to critiques that the city is wasting money.

A proposed new traffic signal and major redesign of 17th and Leary. This is a strong point in the design. This is a much-needed connection.

The updated concept now includes a traffic signal at 17th and Leary, which is now one of the best parts of the whole project design. Being able to bike safety along 17th all the way to the Burke-Gilman Trail would be amazing, but crossing this odd, curving intersection today can be scary.

Unfortunately, the team still has not carried similar benefits over to the Market Street design. It should be easy and safe for people to cross Market Street at every intersection, and for safety the city should be looking to eliminate the known hazards caused when multiple general traffic lanes travel in the same direction. SDOT's Vision Zero studies have found that the vast majority of pedestrian deaths occur on streets with multiple lanes in the same direction, and this stretch of Market Street is on the city's high injury network map. Four-to-five lanes of traffic in one of the busiest business districts in the city is awful, especially since Market doesn't even connect to any major roads or highways west of 15th Ave W. It should be designed as a neighborhood-focused street with transit, not a multi-lane highway.

The top piece of feedback by far during the previous design phase was that there needed to be more separation between biking and walking spaces. This was a consensus point where seemingly everyone agreed with whether they were residents of the Ballard Landmark building, bicycle advocates, or people who care about the pedestrian environment in the business district. Here's the project team's feedback summary chart from late 2024:

December 2024 chart summarizing public feedback on the proposed design for Market Street.

Now here is the latest 60% design concept for the trail on Market Street:

It is telling that these renderings do not show anyone biking in the mixing zone areas, and they doesn't show anyone walking in the multi-use trail in front of businesses.

The latest design still sends trail and sidewalk users into mixing zones" at every intersection, including a very large mixing zone near Bergen Place Park where Leary, Market and 22nd Ave NW intersect. Where the trail does exist, the project team did little more than color it red. There is still no separation between walking and biking spaces. The majority of the street space on Market would still be occupied by four-to-five lanes of traffic, and the design still takes space away from the sidewalk and tears down all the trees to create space for the trail (the trees depicted in the renderings would be new ones).

Anyone who has spent any time on Market Street or any other similarly-busy commercial street knows what will happen here. People will spill out of businesses and occupy the whole sidewalk because that's what storefront sidewalks are for. There are a lot of similar business districts in the country and even in Washington State that go as far as banning biking on sidewalks like these, and here we have the city trying to instead route one of our busiest bike routes onto one? It makes no sense, especially since SDOT knows how to build a safe bike route on a street like Market: Protected bike lanes that are separate from both the sidewalk and general traffic. We have entire design guides for all the different ways to build them, and we have many examples in our own city. This trail" design completely defies all of our existing knowledge about how to create a safe bike route.

Rather than tearing down existing trees and using sidewalk space to create a walking and biking trail, the city could instead use the existing trees as a separator between the sidewalk and protect bike lane. The bike lanes could be at a different level from the sidewalk to prevent mixing, and Market Street could be redesigned to be safer and calmer with shorter crosswalks and lower speeds. Transit priority elements can keep buses moving, including bus lanes and queue jumps where needed. We made this rough illustration back in 2024, and it remains relevant (modified to show possible eastbound bus lane):

Top two images from SDOT's 2024 designs. Bottom is Seattle Bike Blog's rough concept. The bike lane could be at a different level from the sidewalk and protected from general traffic. The existing trees and sidewalk could remain.

Our suggested comments would be:

• Drop the focus on building a trail and instead focus on creating a high quality biking and walking experience.
• Separate biking and walking spaces.
• People should be able to comfortably hang out on the sidewalk.
• Project should also aim to make Market safer for everyone.
• Crosswalk and traffic safety improvements on Leary are great.
• A safer crossing at 17th/Leary is great.