Next week’s community meeting with Seattle Department of Transportation representatives, it turns out, will go beyond the Pike/Pine Pedestrian Zone.
Officials had said a discussion with residents and business owners would be the next step in sorting out to do with the Pike/Pine pilot of a closed street zone around the neighborhood’s nightlife core. But SDOT’s plans for Tuesday’s meeting include the pilot — and the large amount of feedback City Hall has received from workers, residents, and store owners alike on ways E Pike could be changed and improved.
The 2015 street closure pilot was an attempt to address issues of crowd control, sidewalk congestion, and LGBTQ visibility and accessibility in the rambunctious Pike/Pine nightlife core of Capitol Hill, and the results indicated overwhelming from participants support for a more pedestrian-friendly corridor, city officials say.
SDOT public space specialist and meeting organizer Seth Geiser tells CHS that Tuesday’s meeting is not, however, going to be focused on extensive structural changes to the area. “That’s not really on the table at this point,” he said.
Instead, the meeting will be an opportunity for community members to brainstorm smaller solutions to the problems they see. Geiser says that one of the biggest themes he has seen in feedback so far is people “grappling with the rate of development and change” and how that development impacts activity on the street.
SDOT and the Office of Economic Development will create a recommendation from the feedback but whether it will look anything like last summer’s pedestrian zone plan is unclear.
The meeting takes place Tuesday, June 14th, at V2 in the old Value Village, 1525 11th Ave, from 5 to 7 PM.
So let me get this straight.
There is extensive support for a more ped-friendly corridor.
SDOT and the Economic Dev dept are spending time soliciting yet more community input.
BUT…. they won’t consider extensive changes.
Yet extensive changes which are the very thing that people who live in the neighborhood and largely support its businesses are clamoring for.
I read it as they’re looking for suggestions in the vein of lighter/faster/cheaper http://www.pps.org/reference/lighter-quicker-cheaper-a-low-cost-high-impact-approach/ rather than widen the sidewalks, lay down cobblestone, concrete benches fountains and arches. Stuff like in the “Street Fight” or “Tactical Urbanism” books.
I’ve been pretty opposed to this closure because it seems like it caters to bars and people coming from out of the neighborhood to the bars on the weekends. What do the people in the neighborhood gain from this? Will the bars make more revenue and therefore be able to pay people to pick up the garbage and clean up the puke I have to avoid every Saturday and Sunday morning? Will it keep drunk people from fighting outside my windows at 2 AM? Will it keep those drunk people from getting in their cars and driving after they are done fighting?
Also it doesn’t help that every time this is brought up a picture is posted of people laying in the street.
Yes, we need to make sure drunk people can lay in the street.
The only way I can get behind this is if they make this a pedestrian street ALL the time. Not just for party time on the weekends.
how do you know those people laying in the street are drunk?
yes, i get your point about the closure not just catering to bars. but the point with continuing testing is to do more and different kinds of closures; like during the day. instead of just saying, we tried this a couple of nights last year and so, let’s wait until next year to try and do something else.
from what i’ve read and seen, it seems like giving people more room to walk around, particularly when drinking, does help keep the level of fights down. no more accidental bumps misconstrued as an invitation to a fight. and, who knows, maybe with more space to walk around in, some of us from the neighborhood might actually start going back out at night.
i’m in agreement with your sentiment about making the street closure a more routine thing. but let’s not start off the conversation with opposition. let’s approach this with ideas on how we can keep testing – NOW – instead of hemming and hawing for another year.