NE Seattle Greenways celebrates the 11th Ave bike lane opening – UPDATED

Gordon Padelford, Executive Director of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, addresses riders at the start.

UPDATE: The kid and I joined Thursday's ride. On a global news day as stressful as today, I really needed a bike ride and some positive community energy. So thanks to everyone who came out. When so many things seem to get worse, it's important to celebrate when we make things better.

Original story:

Before from street view compared to my photo from shortly after the new bike lane opened.

Though some work is still ongoing on the NE 43rd Street connection, NE Seattle Greenways is hosting a community bike ride to celebrate the new 11th Ave NE protected bike lane 6 p.m. today (June 12) starting at U District Station's 43rd Street entrance. RSVP online so they have an idea of how many people to expect.

The new bike lane was part of a repaving project, and the new bike lane starts where the bike lanes that are part of the under-construction RapidRide J project will end. For a while it may seem odd that the protected part of the bike lane starts halfway up the hill from the University Bridge, but it will make sense when all the work is complete.

As someone who uses this bike lane just about daily, it has made the ride so much less stressful, especially the block south of NE 45th Street. Previously, the two general purpose lanes widened out to four lanes and the paint-only bike lane disappeared, creating a stressful block of uphill biking. There were also sharrows painted in three of the four lanes, which really didn't help clarify the situation. There was also some street parking that made things even less predictable for people biking because sometimes you could just ride in the rightmost lane, but sometimes the path there was blocked.

Now, there is a protected bike lane all the way to and through the intersection complete with a concrete barrier to deter right turners from encroaching into the bike lane. Right turns and the bike lane have separate signal phase, and it works well. It's the kind of improvement that feels so right it seems strange that it was ever any other way.

The project is not perfect. North of 45th Street and especially north of 50th, 11th Ave NE does not carry nearly enough traffic to warrant two general purpose travel lanes. In 2019, the street only carried 5,900 vehicles per day north of 45th and even fewer north of 50th. In traffic terms, that's nothing, and it's about half of what its one-way couplet partner Roosevelt Way carries (there are far more commercial destinations on Roosevelt than 11th and people are more likely to be looking for an I-5 bypass route heading toward downtown than away from it). This project was a big missed opportunity to improve safety, especially for people crossing 11th. SDOT's Vision Zero review found that 80% of people killed in Seattle traffic while walking were killed on streets with more than one general traffic lane in the same direction. Seattle needs to be reducing streets to one lane in each direction at every opportunity, and 11th was an obvious candidate.

1959 photo looking north from Campus Parkway showing the final days of two-way traffic on Roosevelt as the connection to 11th is under construction. Photo from the Seattle Municipal Archive.

The next big opportunity for change here may come sooner than later because the city needs to either rehab or replace the north approach of the University Bridge. This is a major opportunity to undo some big engineering mistakes of the past, simplify movements for all users, improve bus pathways, and free up land for other uses. The bridge connections were designed before I-5 existed and with an active railroad beneath it, so it makes no sense in today's U District that is home to some of the densest housing in the state as well as one of the busiest biking and walking trails. We could, for example, turn both Roosevelt and 11th back into two-way streets with Roosevelt being the primary commercial boulevard. We could then improve the Campus Parkway connections, which could open up vastly improved bus routing and stop location options by getting rid of the awkward westbound trench and underpass situation. We could also improve the connections to the Burke-Gilman Trail, which are all very strange and unintuitive today. UW and SDOT should see this as a massive opportunity to partner on a dramatic redesign of the whole area and get started with their visioning process going sooner than later.

Wow, that was quite the digression. What were we talking about? Oh, yes, today's community bike ride! If you hate this idea, you can tell me to my face at 6 p.m. More details and an RSVP form from NE Seattle Greenways:

The 11th/12th Ave bike lanes are now complete! This creates a north-bound counterpart to the south-bound Roosevelt Way bike lanes.

Join enthusiastic neighbors with NE Seattle Greenways for a fun ride to celebrate the opening of this new bike lane starting at the plaza across from the U District light rail station and ending with a tasty treat at Green Lake.

When: Thursday, June 12, 2025 6:00 pm
Where:
Start: U District Station Square (across Brooklyn Ave from the U District light rail station)
4301 Brooklyn Ave NE

End: Bell's Cookies
6900 East Green Lake Way N Suite D, Seattle, WA 98115