Sometimes pedestrians share the sidewalk with bicycles. When that happens, bicyclists are required to yield to pedestrians. From the PI’s Seattle 911 blog:
Every person riding a bike on a sidewalk or public path shall yield the right of way to a pedestrian and must give an audible signal before overtaking and passing any pedestrian, Seattle police spokesman Jeff Kappel said.
In the 1950s, Seattle annexed unincorporated land between N 85th St and N 145th St. However, with no local jurisdiction, much of that area was not developed with sidewalks and according to local resident Richard Dyksterhuis, little has changed since then. Like the Bitter Lake resident who wants to make his neighborhood more walkable, Dyksterhuis wants to make this part of town better for walking.
For the past five years, Dyksterhuis, 83, has rallied neighbors and contacted city officials numerous times to call attention to the lack of sidewalks on his street. “Between 800 and 1,200 low income elderly live in the Linden Avenue area,” said Dyksterhuis, who wants to make it into a complete neighborhood street where his peers can walk or use their wheelchairs safely.
There has been some improvement recently:
A 100-foot stretch of gravel and potholes has been asphalted and a line painted on the pavement to mark the path for pedestrians. Further north, bewteen 143rd and 145th streets, an 8-foot-wide sidewalk was built last fall, three years after Dyksterhuis and other neighborhood activists got Mayor Nickels to pay a visit and the project was included in the city’s budget.
However, more could be done to transform the area by making it more walkable:
But opportunity for change has opened since two car dealerships have gone out of business and the big lots have been put up for sale. “I want you to find a developer with a heart, compassion, sense of beauty and commitment to social change,” said Dyksterhuis, who envisions a residential complex with a 18-story apartment building, a European-style plaza and small businesses. “It would help transform Aurora Avenue North.”
Our current mayor started his path into politics by helping to get sidewalks installed in his neighborhood of Greenwood. However, there are more sidewalks needed. Residents are working to have sidewalks installed in Greenwood and needs more volunteer support.
The “Greenwood Sidewalks” Neighborhood Matching Fund project is getting underway, and the group working on it needs more volunteers to make it happen. The project includes not just sidewalks, but drainage, planted buffers, etc.
While there are many neighborhoods that make it easy to get around by foot, the neighborhood of Bitter Lake is not one of them.
A resident examined the limitations of the area and came up with some suggestions of how to make Bitter Lake more walkable.
As you can see it’s a fairly discrete area, bounded on four sides by busy arterials. Inside those arterials, there’s no reason you couldn’t have a thriving community. It already has a decent walkability score. There are a couple of parks; Greenwood boasts several restaurants and cafes; Aurora has an array of big box retailers; there’s a great supermarket just a few blocks north of 145th. There are more people coming in, too, as a series of condos are built along Linden.
But despite all the ingredients … there is no such community. The first and primal cause is that there are no %*#! sidewalks. (You hear me Mayor McGinn? Show me what the new guy can do!) But I think the problems run deeper. Look closely at the map and you’ll note that the development pattern is almost aggressively misanthropic. Everyone is isolated from everyone else!
Consider how the character of the neighborhood might be different if it were more of a grid
There’s some more good stuff there, including some history of the area, and a suggestion for us all.
Here’s the takeaway, for the few hearty souls still reading this logorrheic post: one of the biggest challenges in years ahead, as we attempt to densify and green our communities, will be retrofitting existing neighborhoods to increase walkability, sociability, sustainability, and safety. It’s worth a minute of anyone’s time to ponder how they could make their own surroundings more amenable to spontaneous, non-commercial, human-scale social interaction.
The A-frame advertisements that local businesses place on the sidewalk to attract business can get in the way sometimes. Those sandwich boards have to compete for sidewalk space with bike racks, outdoor tables and chairs, trees, and of course people.
For that reason, the city limits businesses to one sandwich board. However, recent enforcement of that rule is hurting a Pioneer Square business.
Customers at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop have been cut by more than a third since the bookshop was told to remove its second sign.
While people do need enough space to use the sidewalk comfortably, advertisements for nearby establishments can be a helpful enhancement to the causal walking experience.
At a time when businesses and Pioneer Square in general are struggling, is a one-sign limit reasonable? In Portland, businesses have to pay a nominal fee for additional sidewalk signage. Would a policy like that be an improvement here?
The city council is looking into restricting aggressive panhandling, which is something that may affect pedestrians from time to time. People would still be asked to ask for money, but it would be illegal to intimidate or ask for money too close to an ATM. The proposal is being led by councilmember Tim Burgess and the public had a chance to offer input on the measure at this Wednesday’s public safety and education committee meeting.
Downtown business-community members, who largely support Burgess’ proposal, said tourists and locals avoid downtown because they are afraid of and intimidated by people asking for money.
Many people who testified against the ordinance said it’s poverty that makes people uncomfortable and the city should spend more money helping the poor and homeless instead.
A bill to fund a network of paths for pedestrians and bicyclists has been introduced in the US House of Representatives. H.R. 4722 would provide $2 billion in grants to improve walking routes across the country.
If you’re so inclined, Transportation for America is making it easy to contact your representatives to ask them to support this measure.
The laws governing when and where pedestrians can legally cross a street may not be universally clear. Fortunately, the Post-Intelligencer’s Seattle 911 blog has addressed quite a few of these issues in the past, so let’s take a look how the laws apply to pedestrians.
First off, pedestrians can legally cross a street at any intersection, even if it’s not a marked crosswalk (except where specifically prohibited, of course). And, of course, cars are required to stop:
State law says drivers must stop and remain stopped to allow a pedestrian to cross the roadway within a crosswalk, unmarked or marked, “when the pedestrian us upon or within one lane of the half of the roadway upon which the vehicle is traveling or onto which it is turning.” (There are exceptions for curb ramps.)
However, at an unmarked crosswalk, cars are not required to yield for you until you’ve begun to step out into the roadway:
At an uncontrolled intersection (no signals, signs, or marked crosswalks), if a pedestrian is standing on the sidewalk or off of the roadway and has not stepped out onto the roadway so as to indicate an intention to cross the street, vehicular traffic is not required to stop.
However, once the pedestrian steps or is in the act of stepping into the street, he/she has indicated an intention to cross the street and vehicular traffic must come to a complete stop and allow the pedestrian to cross.
And, in case you were wondering, the same laws apply to the Seattle Streetcar.
Also, apparently, crossing the street at somewhere other than an intersection is legal as long as you yield to traffic.
Every pedestrian crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right of way to all vehicles upon the roadway.
However, to be clear, this doesn’t apply to arterials:
Seattle police spokesman Mark Jamieson says if you’re crossing in the middle of the block and not at an intersection, then that would be illegal. “If somebody tries to cross the street in the middle of the block because they see an opening, then they would be jaywalking and would be subject to ticket if they were stopped.”
So, I suppose that means that you can cross any neighborhood street pretty much anywhere, but can only cross arterial streets at an intersection or crosswalk. However, the streets of Pike Place Market are legal to cross anywhere:
The Seattle Municipal code prohibits pedestrians from crossing an arterial street other than in a crosswalk except upon the following portions of streets within the Pike Place Market Historical District
At signaled intersections, it’s illegal to cross when the “don’t walk” signal is flashing. However I rarely see anyone observing that, as most people seem to prefer scampering across the intersection before the light changes over halting their momentum to wait for the next walk signal.
Anyway, hopefully this helps clear things up a little bit about what you can and can’t do (legally) as a pedestrian.
The PI’s Seattle 911 blog answers a question about whether a jogger can jog in the road when a sidewalk is available:
“It is not legal for pedestrians to walk or jog in the street if a sidewalk is available,” Seattle Department of Transportation spokeswoman Peg Nelson said. “Any enforcement of this practice would have to come from the Seattle Police Department.”
Seattle pedestrians are hesitant to jaywalk, but I think the occasional uneven or overgrown sidewalks probably make breaking this law a little more tempting.
