This summer, for the first time, Seattle banned cars in the Pike Place Market :
Last year (2024), some politicians said no one will shop here anymore if it’s pedestrianized :
https://publicola.com/2024/04/02/dont-open-pike-place-to-pedestrians-council-member-urges/
Wait, people think that people want to drive in Seattle? Lol fuck that shit. Worst road layouts I’ve ever seen, terrible traffic, and a good light rail and bus system.
I tried to drive in Seattle one time about 15 years ago. As far as I can tell, the lane markers and other road paint in Seattle must be designed to become completely invisible as soon as the road gets wet. And it’s wet a lot.
I think its a PNW thing. Portland area is like that as well.
The only people that use to drive through there were tourists that put the location in their GPS and then got stuck.
Them and delivery/Uber drivers.
Ugh. The amount of Uber drivers that actually dropped people off in the middle of Pike Plac was infuriating.
oh my god they pedestrianized Pike Place?? that’ll make it a thousand times nicer, i hope they don’t gentrify-out that really good random dim sum street food place with the huge bao
They definitely won’t, the prices will just go up to match the rents. Last time I was there the line was insanely long, raising prices certainly wouldn’t deter the majority of their customers.
The market is owned by the city and managed by the market council, public ownership keeps the rent low for the small businesses that operate there!
So the argument was “if we make it walkable, people will stop coming here”?
Yep, that is indeed what it boils down to because it’s a major tourist attraction for people coming in to visit Seattle. So the city councilperson argued that it would reduce people visiting if they had to park far away.
Glad to see they were wrong.
I’ve been to Seattle twice and we went to the market both times. We always walked from our hotel bc there’s quite a few hotels in that area (almost like it’s a hot tourist area) but even when we wanted to go somewhere further away, we just either used public transit or those rentable scooter things. Also the first time we went to pike place market like 4 years ago or something cars kept trying to drive around the crowd and it made everything so much worse. I swear some people have forgotten that not using a car is an option, even when they only want to go somewhere a block away
Some shades or trees will improve this place even more.
A lot of traffic came from people passing through in their cars just because Google Maps said so. It’s stupid to clog up a social area in most cities.
The cars there were always a joke. It was always some poor sucker of a tourist who didn’t know what it was and would take half an hour to go three blocks dodging all the tourists.
Yes, even if you could legally drive in Pike’s Place, for all intents and purposes, you might as well say that you couldn’t drive there before. Those politicians who said nobody would shop there were either lying through their teeth or completely uninformed.
Lol wtf. I’ve lived in Seattle most of my life now, and have known Pike Place Market since I first moved here in the early 90s. And that strip of road down there NEVER should have been a road. Seattle needs to just mark it off and have it be foot traffic only.
That also being said, there’s something to it though, being crammed on the sidewalk in the pouring rain, alongside a million other people on this tiny little sidewalk, around all the various hidden and famous shops and importers.
I don’t think anybody actually thought closing the road from car traffic would negatively affect the market. You’d have to be a vitriolic idiot to actually believe that. That’s like saying having a bus service Disneyland would make people less likely to go. It just doesn’t make sense.
Yeah, I live in Seattle and have been to Pike Place many a time. Having cars down there was fucking deranged. Neither the pedestrians nor the drivers could possibly have been happy about the situation.
It was like 70% tourists who were routed that way by Google maps. The terror on a Midwestern Grandma’s face as she tried to navigate the road while pedestrians push within inches of her rental cars bumper was priceless.
It really needs more trees, dang.
Notice how they made it walkable and now there’s nobody there. /s
And look, nobody in the shops, everybody’s just walking there! /s (It do need more trees tho.)
Banning all non-delivery and non-emergency vehicles should have been done many years ago in the most visited attraction in the Pacific Northwest. But I’m glad to see Seattle as one of the leading US cities in urban planning.
This plus the light rail build out has made living here without a car so much more pleasant. If only the rail went all the way up to Everett…
Looks like a fucking european street
fucking finally. Pike Market has always been too crowded for cars anyway
So many parking spaces wasted! Now small businesses will suffer 😢
Tap for spoiler
/s
Oh fuck I didn’t hear about this! Now I actually want to go back to Pike Place Market. I haven’t been in ages because of the fucking cars
