Building I-5 left many scars in the Pinehurst neighborhood, new walking and biking projects hope to heal some of them

Opening Day September 30, 2026.

The new Pinehurst Station has a horrible walkshed with very few destinations or homes within a 5-minute walk of the station entrance. This point has been made well, and there are efforts to allow more housing near the station, including in the golf course. Rather than rehash those points, it's worth looking at how the area go to be the way that it is and what the city is doing to help heal old transportation wounds by reconnecting neighborhoods with better walking and biking options.

You don't need to dive into a dusty folder in an archive to get an idea of what happened here. Just look at the satellite view taken before the currently under-construction street work began:

This is an absolutely mangled street network. From Google Maps.

There are at least two generations of bad street design decisions that collided in this spot a half century ago. The first dates back to the early 1930s when the road network was laid out before King County rezoned the area for suburban residential development. The early 30s were an awful time for traffic engineering. At the same time Seattle was working on plans to dig a trench through Woodland Park for Aurora Ave, road planners in the Pinehurst Station area sliced a diagonal roadway through the neighborhood's street grid with little regard for the functions of the soon-to-be neighborhood itself. The pre-freeway design of this diagonal section of what would soon be named Roosevelt Way North" was for the benefit of others passing through, not for the area itself. Diagonal streets of this kind cause awful traffic congestion, traffic safety and neighborhood connectivity problems just about everywhere they were built: Green Lake Way N, Holman Road NW, parts of Fauntleroy Way SW, parts of MLK Jr Way S, 2nd Avenue Extension S, etc. The list is long, but you can usually identify them based on how perfectly straight they are and by the strange little triangle lots that they left behind. These diagonals were designed with the intention of moving cars above all other considerations, which is ironic since now they are often the cause of the worst traffic backups because they create such strange and inefficient intersections. Traffic engineers just didn't know what they were doing back then.

October 3, 1926 ad in the Seattle Daily Times. At the time, the roads mostly ended at 110th Street (now Northgate Way), and today's Pinehurst Station would be several blocks north of the initial neighborhood area.

The big draw to the area was the opening of Jackson Park Golf Course, a highly-anticipated public golf course to rival Jefferson Park Golf Course on Beacon Hill. Players of the new course were to be called Jacks" because Jefferson Park golfers called themselves Jeffs." Eight groups of women played on opening day in May 1930, which was notable since so many golf clubs were men-only. The Haller Lake circle was also a well-established private community, though they seemed mostly focused on keeping others out at the time as neighbors spent much of the 1930s fighting King County's plans for a public playground and public access to the lake via 125th Street.

As the area near the station developed into a suburban neighborhood, street safety was not a priority. A photo in 1954 shows some Pinehurst dads using gardening tools to create a path next to 5th Ave NE between NE 125th and 130th Streets just south of the current station. They said they were concerned that their kids did not have a safe way to walk to Haller Lake School safely. Then a public school, Haller Lake School was sold in 1980 and is the current site of Lakeside Middle School.

Seattle Sunday Times, September 19, 1954.

Those kids walking from 5th Ave NE to Haller Lake School were not given any consideration when the second generation of terrible street design arrived in the 1960s: the Interstate. I-5 cut a trench through the neighborhood, and between 117th and 145th, only 130th Street has a bridge across it. To somehow make things worse, the 130th Street bridge and the remade road connections near it were designed to put cars as the top priority, leaving anyone outside a motor vehicle with no quality options for getting around. I-5 also sliced the old Roosevelt Way diagonal in half, leaving some very strange remnants on both sides. A southbound ramp amputated a corner of Northacres Park and the ramp's little triangle included no sidewalk or crosswalk for people walking along the south side of the 130th, a condition that was in place until the current construction project began. I don't know how to describe this ramp design other than cruel.

There was no crosswalk to get to the bridge and no sidewalk across the triangle divider of the start of the ramp. How could anyone design such a monstrosity in a place where people are supposed to live?

Seattle inherited the original street design issues when it annexed the area in the 1950s, and then the city inherited the freeway problems from the state highways department (the precursor to WSDOT). SDOT cannot undo all these past errors by itself. They don't have the budget or authority to lid the freeway, and they are not deleting the diagonal part of Roosevelt Way. But they are building new biking and walking connections on this one corridor that does connect across, which is huge. They have also been at work connecting other parts of the neighborhood to this crossing through new shared use trails and neighborhood greenways.

Map of 20 walking and biking projects, from SDOT.

The value of all this work should come to fruition when the 130th/Roosevelt/125th safety project is complete in the coming months since this one project ties many others together and crosses the single biggest barrier to walking and biking in the area: I-5. It's not going to make the station a walking and biking paradise or magically generate the level of ridership the station would get if it were near dense housing and popular destinations, but it should make things a lot better than they were.

The centerpiece of the all the changes aside from the station itself is probably the new roundabout at Roosevelt and NE 125th Street. Its design is quite different from many other roundabouts in the state that either ignore bicycling or treat it as an afterthought, usually by routing bikes onto the sidewalk. Unlike the new roundabouts near Shoreline South Station 15 blocks north, the 125th and Roosevelt design will include a complete and separated bike lake around the intersection and people walking and biking will only cross a single lane of traffic at a time. There were still some sections of the bike lane that were closed and lots of landscaping, painting and signal work when I visited during the opening celebration for the station Wednesday, but it is getting close. I will be very interested to see how this design functions in action because it is unlike anything people are used to. The protected bike lanes on 125th from 15th to Roosevelt seem mostly complete (and full of leaves), and the bike lanes on Roosevelt from 125th to 130th are about half complete. So I can't give a full review or analysis yet. I was there a little after 4, so it was not quite rush hour but was getting close, and traffic seemed to flow smoothly and safely. The only worrying stuff I observed was due to people needing to merge into general traffic to get around the closed bike lane section.

I also saw one guy who seems to have life all figured out. Amid all the (legitimate) complaining about siting this station and all this road work near a golf course, I saw this guy traveling through the new roundabout at 12th and Roosevelt with his golf bag strapped to his e-bike.