All are invited to a Seattle Department of Transportation open house on Thursday, July 19 from 6:30-8 p.m. at Jefferson Community Center (3801 Beacon Ave. S.) to discuss the Beacon Hill Neighborhood Greenway.
The greenway is a 2.8 mile long pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly route through North Beacon Hill, providing improved access to locations including the I-90 Trail, Beacon Hill Station, Beacon Hill Library, Jefferson Park, Maplewood Playfield, Mercer Middle School, Maple Elementary School, and Cleveland High School.
The route has changed slightly since the earlier proposed version of the Greenway. The current route will start at the I-90 Trail and 18th Avenue South, then continue south along 18th. The greenway will then turn and cross Beacon Avenue South at South Hanford Street, and continue on Lafayette Avenue South into Jefferson Park. The route will continue south of Jefferson Park, crossing 15th Avenue South at South Dakota Street, and continuing on 12th Avenue South to South Lucile Street.
What makes a run-of-the-mill route a neighborhood greenway? Greenways are non-arterial street routes that have improvements to encourage and support safe bicycle and pedestrian use, in combination with reduced auto speeds and volumes. In the case of the Beacon Hill Greenway, these enhanced features have been proposed:
- Signs and pavement legends along the greenway
- Stop signs to control traffic crossing the greenway
- A median island with new marked crosswalks at Lafayette Avenue South and South Spokane Street
- A median island with new marked crosswalks at Beacon Avenue South and SouthHanford Street
- Rechannelization and signal improvements at Beacon Avenue South and South Spokane Street
- A widened sidewalk on South Dakota Street between 16th Avenue South and 14th Avenue South
- A paved trail adjacent to Jefferson Park
View Beacon Hill Neighborhood Greenway in a larger map
Some community volunteers have stepped forward to provide translation services for this event. We will have translators for Mandarin and Spanish and potentially Vietnamese. Please attend if you can and invite your neighbors!
I’ve been absolutely psyched about the greenway, but now I’m kind of irritated. 🙁 After all the “traffic calming” work on 15th, some of the more aggressive drivers did indeed divert to Beacon Ave… but if the city puts a median strip up there to help throttle traffic, and there’s no third arterial for determined asshat drivers to “escape” to, you just know they’ll go right back down to 15th, because alternate-side parking is a lesser deterrant than mid-road obstacles.
I wish the various city projects would coordinate in advance on stuff like this, so they wouldn’t be wasting our money — and the time we take to attend the meetings! — by working at cross purposes to each other. They could have taken that traffic-calming budget and spent it on something nice for our neighborhood, like sidewalks without cracks that could swallow a chihuahua.