Featured guest Ray Delahanty of CityNerd was a big fan of the Lake Washington Boulevard open street.
On Saturday, The Urbanist hosted a bike ride and meetup along Lake Washington Boulevard with Ray Delahanty of the popular CityNerd YouTube channel. The turnout blew us away, with more than 200 people joining the festivities. Taking place during the last weekend that Lake Washington Boulevard was an open street for the 2023 season, the event underscored that Lake Washington Boulevard should be pedestrianized year-round, with car access restricted like it was this weekend.
While the City of Seattle closed the three-mile segment of Lake Washington Boulevard to cars for much of the summer of 2020, and every weekend in 2021 as a Covid response measure, it has since reverted to the limited weekend closure/open street routine of pre-pandemic times. The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and Seattle Parks hosted 10 car-free open street weekends on the boulevard in 2023.
From fall through spring, riders will have to bide their time or risk their lives on a corridor where speeding is rampant and motorists routinely make unsafe passes. And it’s certainly not like a wealth of alternative routes for people biking and rolling exist through the area, given the dearth of safe streets infrastructure and a number of delayed safety projects in Southeast Seattle.
Surveys have repeatedly shown that the open street on Lake Washington Boulevard is wildly popular and widely supported, but the Harrell administration has remained hesitant to change the status quo car dominance of the street. Since 2020, The Urbanist editorial board has urged the City to make the pedestrianization permanent.
