With Alaskan Way bikeway opening, Seattle has a complete bike route along its downtown waterfront for the first time in city history

Photo from the brand new SDOT Bluesky account.

SDOT finished up work on the new Alaskan Way bikeway between Myrtle Edwards Park and the Overlook Walk, just in time for Friday's much-awaited opening of the new park and playground at Pier 58.

For the first time in the city's history, Seattle will have a complete and connected bike path on its downtown waterfront. For generations, anyone biking along the waterfront had to choose between mixing with busy car and truck traffic or wading through crowded sidewalks. Most opted for a third option: Avoid biking on the waterfront unless absolutely necessary.

That all changed this year, and Thursday's opening of the Alaskan Way bikeway has made it official. The waterfront (should we rename it the Dzidzilalich Trail?) is poised to be the new busiest bike route in the city, challenging the Westlake bikeway and even the storied Burke-Gilman Trail. It's a route that is both appealing to tourists and useful for transportation. Riding along the waterfront will soon be in every What to do in Seattle" guide. It will be a defining and lasting part of downtown Seattle culture, the kind of thing newcomers and visitors will assume has always been there.

Yes, I wish the surface roadway along the central waterfront segment were skinnier and the walking and biking spaces were wider, but even those skinnier-than-they-should-be bike lanes are glorious.

It's wild to think that a continuous bike connection to Myrtle Edwards Park and the Elliott Bay Trail almost didn't happen. It took a huge amount of organizing and community advocacy to convince the city to add it to the to-do list. Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and Cascade Bicycle Club both put a lot of effort into it, and the project's fate ultimately relied on leadership from Seattle Port Commissioners who powered through a lot of resistance from the cruise terminal to find a solution. It is very easy to imagine a scenario where they just said, No, a path won't work here," and then dug in their heels to stop it. Instead, a unique compromise was found in which the bike route will detour around the cruise terminal only during loading and unloading hours. We'll have to watch to see how this arrangement works in practice, but it is great that people should not be forced to cross the street twice during the majority of the time when there is no cruise activity.

It is now possible to bike from the Ship Canal Trail to Alki without ever mixing with car through-traffic (there's a short on-street section in Interbay, but it's on a dead-end street and is low-stress). If you walk your bike across the Ballard Locks, you can even bike more than 15 miles from Golden Gardens to Alki Beach via the Seattle downtown waterfront without mixing with car through-traffic at any point. Not long ago, this concept seemed like the stuff of dreams. Freaking awesome.

It has taken generations of advocacy dating back to at least the 1960s and decades of investments from the city, the port, the state and even the federal government to get us to this point. The nine-year Move Seattle Levy, which expired at the end of 2024, set out with a goal of connecting our disparate bike network, and the finishing of this final waterfront gap is that levy's mic drop. The people of Seattle invested in ourselves, and it paid off.

The 2025 SDOT bike map with the newly-complete waterfront bike route highlighted.