Hello,
It’s been a busy few weeks. SDOT was out in the neighborhood a Sunday ago collecting community ideas for how to make our neighborhood a low pollution neighborhood. We hope this includes making Pike a destination and it looked like neighbors agreed. We also took Councilmember Foster on a walk to talk about the need for improvements to this area.
SDOT’s Low Pollution Neighborhood program is evaluating how to make Capitol Hill a Low Pollution Neighborhood. SDOT is working with stakeholders to shape a vibrant center where people come to visit, shop, and spend time. SDOT is gathering ideas for how to create welcoming streets, support local businesses, and pilot other innovations like e-cargo delivery and other ways to make our neighborhood easier to access.
We learned at their open house that they’re seeing this vibrant center as Pike/Pine from Bellevue to 15th as well as all sides of Cal Anderson (North to John, west to Broadway, east to 12th, and south to Madison). They have not made any commitments or plans for what they hope to do in this area yet and had a wide ranging list of potential treatment types that they could apply. They were openly accepting feedback from the packed room on what they wanted to see for Capitol Hill.
The SDOT team plans to continue doing their engagement and working with stakeholders to shape the project designs through November and share draft concepts sometime this Winter. We’ll keep pushing for change, we don’t want to see this opportunity fall through and leave us with the status quo.
To this end, we took citywide Councilmember Foster on a walk through Pike this Monday and we discussed the problems with the area. We met in Chophouse Row and while Tailwind was closed, the space remained comfortable, alive, and welcoming. The alley is a great example of what we’d like to see more of on the streets of Pike. We left and talked about the unwelcoming street environment along Pike creating an uncomfortable and unwelcoming feeling due to the lack of pedestrian lighting and the wall of cars confining the sidewalk. We of course discussed scooters and the lack of anywhere to park them and the unsightly and inconvenient places trash is left to sit. While walking we were repeatedly unable to find enough space for our group and forced to block the sidewalk and stand in the streets. We also discussed the problems with the curb space management which leave critical needs like loading and delivery to stop in unsafe and unplanned places. This lack of enough room to both stop and go creates conflict for everybody and pushes people out of the area when we’d all love for this area to be the destination.
Councilmember Foster wanted to know what our vision is. We told her we dream of a Pike that feels like a destination. That would look like:
- Enough room to host an activity or gather with your friends
- Clearer sidewalks with sufficient space to park scooters and cleanly store trash
- Prioritize loading by appropriately allocating curb space to allow space for the critical access needs of the businesses and neighbors
- Design the spaces to be safe and welcoming
We hope to see these problems addressed through the Low Pollution Neighborhood program as these are unquestionably part of making a vibrant and thriving heart of Capitol Hill. To this end we’ve updated our website to include these at destinationpike.com/solutions and hope to further refine what these four requirements would look like.
Thank you, we’re excited to see where this goes. Join the google group to volunteer
Avery and the Destination Pike crew