If you’ve walked, biked, or (hopefully rarely) driven along N 43rd and N 44th Streets between Stone Way and Latona Avenue in the past several weeks you may have noticed the “Wallingford Healthy Street Improvements Coming!” announcement signage.
Healthy Streets were one of the few positive things to result from the COVID-19 pandemic (others being takeaway booze and daytime pajamas). Keeping six feet from other people often meant giving wide berth on sidewalks and zig-zagging through the neighborhood like a drunken squirrel. More walking space was needed.
Far be it from car-dependent Seattle to actually pedestrianize some roadways, “Stay Healthy Streets” (as they were known then) became a compromise: vehicles could still use them, but temporary signage was erected to discourage drivers from entering.
In Wallingford, our existing Neighborhood Greenway was converted into a Stay Healthy Street by installing “street closed” signs along its corridor. Those signs will be made permanent “as soon as 2024” (how vague!) by adding either concrete or planter bases to support them. Painted lines, which will visually narrow the street openings at intersections, will also be added.
A few sections of Seattle roadway have already been converted into permanent Healthy Streets, and my personal observation is that they do indeed feel more protected than streets with the type of signage we currently have on Wallingford’s Healthy Street. One example is 1st Ave NW in Greenwood, which I’ve biked down dozens of times. Kids on bikes and pedestrians pushing strollers freely use the roadway, and vehicle traffic is essentially non-existent.
Motor vehicle traffic is, unsurprisingly, the biggest roadblock for pedestrians to utilize Healthy Street roadways. In a survey conducted by SDOT over the past year, opponents of the Wallingford Healthy Street stated that “drivers just ignore the signs” and that it is “not safe because there are cars going down the street all the time.” These are valid concerns, which will hopefully be addressed by solidifying the infrastructure along this stretch of roadway.
But as the Five Man Electrical Band taught us, signs, signs everywhere a sign, can and will be ignored. Solidified signage and new road markings will help, but the success of Wallingford’s permanent Healthy Street will rely on a critical mass of walkers and bikers using it. Kids on bikes and parents pushing strollers are the true signs of a healthy street.
The survey showed 62% of people against making this permanent, and the conclusion is to therefore make them permanent. It’s kind of odd.
Also I think from walking point of view, I think any streets outside of the arterials feel the same level of safety comparing to SHS. SHS doesn’t add to it. Now if they can reduce parking on these streets, like removing parking on one side, it may make a bigger difference.
True. But in the survey, the #1 specific reason for opposing permanent Stay Healthy Streets is that they “Disrupt traffic flow,” which is exactly the point of Stay Healthy Streets.
So the #1 reason of “not liking the concept” is deemed not specific? It’s just about how you want to read the survey, since obviously the choice of “disrupt traffic flow” is just a small percentage overall, and I think it’s most likely related to Lincoln High situation.
Also how is disrupting traffic flow the goal? Wouldn’t it be better for the community for the traffic flow around Lincoln High around those specific peak hours to be streamlined? It’d not be a bad idea if we have specific traffic pattern designed around the school hours utilizing 43rd better. I am pretty sure the 229 vehicles a day on 43rd are concentrated at specific hours.
Yes, I’d say “not liking the concept” is not a specific reason. I don’t know what you mean by the “Lincoln High situation.” Don’t they have a parking lot north of the school, and away from 43rd?
Lincoln High is between the southbound only Interlake, and the northbound only Woodlawn, with the two connected by 43rd. Both Interlake and Woodlawn has tons of angled parking. What do you think is the situation then on 43rd? And you can go see how heavily parked it is around the block.
When I saw the survey, I was amused to see the stretch they studied didn’t include the part next to Lincoln. You can see Lincoln High mentioned in the report as a concern by people surveyed. I am pretty sure the most common cases of people ignoring the sign is at that stretch. The 44th part is both less of a concern, because it’s not really next to or connecting anything specific. And you can see in the survey the traffic on 44th was light to begin with so the money spent on this is really not making a meaningful impact.
It’s also funny that a positive comment talked about connection to Burke Gilman. I think that person doesn’t know what’s the question asked and just wanted to support something that sounds like pro-walking.
Isn’t Interlake two-way between 45th and the Lincoln parking lot? And the angled parked vehicles can continue onto the same direction and exit onto 45th (from Woodlawn) or Stone (from Interlake via 43rd/44th). I can’t think of a reason when it would be necessary to use 43rd to access Lincoln High.
Some of the Woodlawn parking are basically best accessed through 43rd. If the point is to push that traffic to 42nd, how is that better? Also if you are on the south bound Interlake and you’d want to go East, of course it’s better to go through 43rd. Also, when the whole place is full of people trying to get in and out, isn’t it obvious having 43rd as an option sounds reasonable? No road is necessary. If we just mandate the whole Wallingford to be pedestrian only and enforce it by death penalty, people would live.
The key point is, what’s really the gain of granting that stretch 43rd a special status? Why is it better than 42nd? Why is it better than not having the special status at all?
I agree. The SHS’s only impact will be to increase the property values of houses on those streets. There is no reason to specifically choose a SHS for walking or biking versus any other East/West street.
More and safer cross walks going North/South across 40th would be money well spent. And creating arterials that bikes are safer on would be great. Like what they’ve done on Roosevelt.
I walk along 45th to the stores almost every day. But I have never ridden my bike on 45th. And I ride my bike a lot! Even the “share the road” signs on 45th and Stone have worn off, as if they do anything to improve safety.
Agree 100% and when I emailed “healthy streets” about these concerns, I received the most ridiculous reply. These streets were selected with very little thought and under the guise of COVID. Of course there was more walking and biking during COVID, we were all working from home. Their data during COVID can not be used to inform decisions post COVID; however, SDOT often goes against their own data, so there is that.
I post on NextDoor and got a significant response from the community. It seems that those in Phinney/Greenwood love the permanently closed safe street; however, Wallingford community was much less favorable. I shared concerns with the traffic flow and chaos this creates before and after school, the East / West restrictions and lack of flow already in place, parents not being able to access the park with their kids, etc. However, Jules seemed think the solution was . . . bike racks.
Reply from Jules, “We’ve been collecting community input for the past three years, and in 2022, we conducted the survey you referenced about Wallingford Healthy Street. In that survey, most of the concerns raised about the Healthy Street focused on student drop-off and pick-up by car around Lincoln High School. SDOT’s Safe Routes to School team has been in communication with Lincoln High School to better understand these concerns, and the Lincoln High School PTSA was supportive and excited about encouraging biking to school. They are going to install two bike racks on campus (using funding awarded by SDOT’s Safe Routes to School Mini-Grant program) to improve the Lincoln High School biking facilities. The permanent Wallingford Healthy Street will help provide a safer street environment for students to walk and bike to school.
In addition, based on the mixed results of the 2022 survey, we continued community engagement through this year, and collected more community input through our online feedback form and this inbox. About two-thirds of the responses we received during this time were in favor of the Healthy Street becoming permanent. As part of our evaluation, we also collected vehicle, bike, and walking data at key points along the Healthy Street. We found that there were more people walking and biking per hour when compared to pre-Healthy Street counts (172 people walking and biking per hour in 2022, as compared to 155 in 2017). There was a significant decrease in vehicles driving on both N 43rd and N 44th. On N 43rd, there was an average of 432 daily vehicles in 2014, and post-Healthy Street designation, there was an average of 229 daily vehicles in 2022. On N 44th, there was an average of 274 daily vehicles in 2014, and in 2022, an average of 150 daily vehicles. This reduction in vehicles is aligned with the Mayor’s Transportation and Climate Justice Executive Order, and SDOT’s work to prioritize and expand actions that equitably reduce or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) within the transportation sector.
Based on the additional community input, conversations with Lincoln High School, and the reduced vehicle counts and increased numbers of people walking and biking, we decided to make the Wallingford Healthy Street permanent.
Is there something specific about the design of the Wallingford Healthy Street that you are concerned about? It would be great to hear what your concerns are, so we can see how they can be addressed.”
I find it absurd to say the reduction in vehicles in these specific streets got anything to do with greenhouse gas emission reduction. Do people stop driving, or do they just drive on the next street? I guess the long term street closure at the Stoneway-34th junction has done wonders, since it reduced the number of traffic in that section to zero?
I do think the Healthy Street concept can work way better if we do something like eliminating the parking on one side or something like that to make it truly different. With the streets still crowded by parked cars, the center part of the street is still narrow and you don’t really feel like running or doing most things in the middle of the street. If you ban parking on the street, it’d make a huge difference. Let kids run in the streets or even play balls.
Agreed, when walking around I have little reason to prefer the “stay healthy” streets to any other non-arterial streets. We have sidewalks all over the place and each one is basically just as good as any other.
The story is a bit different when biking. Our network of safe bike infrastructure is less a “network” as such, and more of a collection of disconnected bike lanes of varying quality that often force people to choose between taking circuitous paths vs. riding in mixed traffic and hoping your habit of riding below the car speed limit don’t inspire any road rage today.
All this is to say it’s long past time to designate a large number of streets such as this as bike-priority streets. They started out as “greenways” and the terminology seems to have shifted a bit during the pandemic. Regardless, more of these is a good thing. The greenway/”stay healthy” treatment often comes with electric traffic signals to facilitate safe and efficient bike/pedestrian crossings of arterial streets.
Beyond that, I find the experience of driving on these when necessary to be barely different from any of the other side streets in the neighborhood. You have to go slow on all of them, and you really shouldn’t be relying on these narrow streets for long-distance car travel anyway, so I don’t see any good reason for complaining about this.
Yep, super useless waste of everything. Resources could be much better spent enhancing almost anything else related to enhancing the neighborhood, or how about instead of wasting money here, use it in countless other high-density neighborhoods and not this single-family-home-wealthy-people area. As long as there are cars packed along sides of roads and cars having to squeeze between them (something that won’t be changing) this will not be the thing they’re trying to force. Locals know it and the surveys they do reflect it. This is all so silly.
Who picked 43rd and 44th at first place? Looking at the map and knowing the neighborhood, wouldn’t 42nd be a better choice at first place? 42nd is a better designated walking path serving Hamilton and John Stanford kids being right between car-heavy 40th and 45th. Who does it serve to put it on 44th?
As stated in the post, most Stay Healthy Streets were created from existing Greenways. So I guess your question is why was 43rd/44th picked as Wallingford’s Neighborhood Greenway.
That decision was made by SDOT (along with community input) over a decade ago, and I know one of the reasons was that the hill approaching Wallingford Ave (Burke, actually) is less steep on 44th when walking/riding westbound.
Another reason was (if memory serves me) that drivers were using 44th as a bypass to a backed-up 45th, so the Greenway was meant to also be a traffic-calming measure.
Also, these Greenways were meant to be connections to services (library, groceries, coffee, etc), so putting the route even further from those services on 45th doesn’t make a lot of sense.
So the study they should have done is to compare pedestrian and bike traffic on 45th and 44th, and realize it’s pointless.
The way to make 44th better for the stated purpose is again to ban parking first.