Bike path on Seattle waterfront is missing piece to city puzzle

SEATTLE – At some point in the not-too-distant future, someone will hop on a bike at Alki Beach in West Seattle and ride along Seattle’s corner of the Salish Sea, by the industrial monoliths on Harbor Island and through the hullabaloo of downtown, all the way to Smith Cove, without once interacting with traffic.

Such a thing would’ve been impossible just a few short years ago. But now that 10-mile trek around Elliott Bay is almost a reality, held up only by nearly complete construction projects.

And it was made reality by one prominent piece in the Seattle bikeway puzzle: the waterfront, where now you can connect with the trail from Pioneer Square, downtown and Belltown for a leisurely ride to the aquarium, Seattle Great Wheel, the ferry terminal, Pike Place Market, Overlook Park, concerts at Pier 62 and more.

It’s part of well-told story, but one that deserves retelling.

A decade ago, the shoreline was best seen from one of the 90,000 cars that traveled daily on Highway 99 on a towering, 60-foot-tall viaduct.

The viaduct is gone, and the highway burrows underground. The transformation has left behind a widened pedestrian promenade, an elevated waterfront park called Overlook Walk, a quieter yet still busy surface-level street and a 1.2-mile stretch of safe, protected, two-way bike lanes.

On its own, the waterfront trail is a prime example of how a city can build a safe bikeway through a heavily used space. The trail winds along between the bustling foot traffic on the promenade and belching vehicles on Alaskan Way.

But it also provides a key section to the city’s growing bike network.

To the north of the downtown waterfront, the privately funded Elliott Bay Connections is rebuilding 2 miles of walking and biking trails. To the south, the city is building a separated trail along East Marginal Way. Inland, Seattle’s burgeoning bike connections are growing – from the protected lanes on Pike and Pine streets, and Second and Fourth avenues, to the Burke-Gilman and Mountains to Sound trails, and beyond.

Lee Lambert, executive director of Cascade Bicycle Club, said he first glimpsed the network of today in 2007, when then-Mayor Greg Nickels unveiled an ambitious bicycle master plan with hopes to triple the city’s number of bike commuters and “make Seattle the best bicycling city in the nation,” as Nickels put it.

“Back then, it was just lines on a map,” Lambert said of Nickels’ plan. “Now it’s actual bikeways.”

The intervening years have seen millions of dollars dedicated to building miles of bike lanes, and the state has reigned for most of the past decade as the most bike-friendly state in the nation, according to the League of American Bicyclists.

Seattle’s most recent two-wheeled campaign began with Nickels, and his 2007 plan meant to focus the $27 million earmarked for bike projects in the $365 million, nine-year Bridging the Gap property tax transportation levy passed by voters the year before.

In 2015, voters approved the nine-year, $930 million Move Seattle levy, which added 100 miles to the city’s bike network, according to a recent analysis by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.

Last fall, voters approved another transportation levy – with $113.5 million dedicated to bikeways out of the overall $1.55 billion spending plan.

The expansion hasn’t led to the tripling of commuters as Nickels envisioned. In 2013, for instance, a bike counter recorded about 2,500 cyclists crossing the Fremont Bridge on the average weekday. Ten years later, that number was unchanged – but it should be noted that the numbers were a bit higher before the pandemic hit.

Regardless, the city has seen its biking population increase and it will stay the course, said Mayor Bruce Harrell at a recent celebration for the completion of the bikeways on Pike and Pine streets.

“It’s about improving the bike connections,” he said of the city’s effort to keep building bikeways. “It’s about safety.”

Pike and Pine have curb-protected bike lanes, and connect Pike Place Market, downtown and Capitol Hill. With a little detour around the Market, cyclists can easily make it to the waterfront. Those routes – fusing heavily populated and busy areas – are hardly the only way to converge on the city center.

Elliott Bay Connections – a public-private partnership funded by Melinda French Gates, Amazon co-founder MacKenzie Scott and Expedia Group’s Barry Diller – is revitalizing the trails just north of the Seattle Aquarium to the Beach at Expedia Group, including the stretch through the Olympic Sculpture Park. The group is also renovating Myrtle Edwards and Centennial parks.

The $45 million project – a figure that doesn’t include 10 years of maintenance the three donors are also funding – was first envisioned before the viaduct came down, said Ellen Cavanagh, the project’s director who works with French Gates.

The work was originally intended to make the section of Alaskan Way safer, and help reduce conflicts between walkers, cyclists, people getting on or off cruise ships and motorists.

Now, as the city builds a protected bikeway on the west side of the road and French Gates’ group builds a trail on the east, there will be plenty of safe space for everyone, especially considering that Alaskan Way sees far fewer cars since the viaduct came down.

“It’s not going to get you anywhere very fast, but it will be a much more pleasant experience,” said Cavanagh of her group’s path. “We’re so used to squeezing cycling infrastructure into the available space between cars. But we have the space, let’s use it.”

The project will be complete by next summer, but the trails remain at least partially open.

A few miles south, the city is also improving East Marginal Way South. The road is a major freight corridor and has an unmistakable industrial feel, but cyclists are already seeing the benefits of the city’s nearly $40 million project, which is also expected to be finished next year.

At that point, a separate trail will run parallel to the road – better than the temporary protected bikeway now and leagues better than the unprotected bike lanes that were there previously.

While the Elliott Bay Connections and city work are just two of many bike-related projects underway in Seattle – not to mention work on First Avenue Northeast, 12th Avenue, 15th Avenue Northwest and Beacon Avenue South to name just a few – they fuse the waterfront to a growing, much safer bikeway network.

In fact, Cascade’s Lambert said the waterfront is a piece not just in Seattle’s bike puzzle, but part of something much, much bigger.

“When it’s all said and done, a person will be able to ride from Alki to the Palouse,” he said, referring to the rolling wheat hills of southeastern Washington, some 300 miles from Seattle. “We’re not just talking about the city. We’re talking about the entire region.”