Don’t Open Pike Place to Pedestrians, Council Member Urges

"This is not William Penn's Philadelphia."

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle wants to take plans to turn car-choked Pike Place into an "event street" off the table by amending Mayor Bruce Harrell's proposed Seattle Transportation Plan to express the council's opposition to using funds from the upcoming Move Seattle Levy to partially pedestrianize the street immediately in front of Pike Place Market. The council's transportation committee discussed Kettle's proposed amendment to the plan on Tuesday.

Advocates have been making the case for years that removing vehicles from Pike Place would improve pedestrian safety and make the market a more welcoming place for shoppers, who are now forced to dart between moving vehicles, taking evasive maneuvers that Maggie Haines, the treasurer for Friends of the Market, described fondly as "a slow dance" in her testimony against pedestrianization.

What the transportation plan proposes is far more modest than true pedestrianization. Under the plan, Pike Place would become an "event street" that could be closed down to vehicular traffic for events, much as Ballard Avenue or South Edmunds Street shut down for weekly farmers' markets.

"Event streets," according to the draft plan, are "shared streets" where "events may close movement of all vehicles, except emergency access, on a frequent or intermittent basis." The goal of the new designation, according to the plan, is to "prioritize people walking and rolling around Pike Place while enabling efficient and reliable delivery of goods and access to Pike Place Market."

Vendors and Pike Place Market representatives decried even this modest proposal during the committee's public comment period, suggesting that allowing even occasional street closures would kill businesses and harm low-income people and seniors.

"Pike Place is not an event street by any stretch of the word—it is the lifeline street in the market historical district," Friends of the Market president Heather Pihl said.  "Pike Place Market is a working market, and it's also a community including low income residents, a senior center, a food bank, a child care, and a medical clinic. It's not a place to hang out."

Kettle agreed that making the market pedestrian-only would harm businesses, by making them harder to access by car and limiting access for trucks to load in and out. Calling the proposal a "cookie cutter approach" that does not acknowledge the market's "unique" character, location, and relative lack of access points, Kettle said, "This is not William Penn's Philadelphia, where we have nice squares going everywhere. [Pike Place Market] is on the cusp of falling into the sea. ... There [are] no streets on the other side. There's no First Avenue further west or Second Avenue further west. Basically, we have Elliott Bay."

A poll of vendors by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways last year found that most vendors were open to pedestrianizing Pike Place, and community members who participated in the development of the plan overwhelmingly identified opening Pike Place to pedestrians as their top transportation priority for the downtown area.

Mayor Bruce Harrell released a draft of the plan, which incorporates and subsumes all of the city's the "modal" plans (e.g. the Pedestrian Master Plan) into a single document, in February.