City Proposes “Road Diet” For Admiral Way

We must stop the war on cars! If SDOT and McBike keep this up, transportation investments in vehicle infrastructure will fall to a miserable 95% of all transportation funding! This cannot stand! Luckily, we'll find allies in Conlin and Rasmussen.

Nickerson restriping should be identified as a cost risk for thecity's portion of the AWV replacement project.
If it is so easy to change back then SDOT will not have a problem setting funding capacity aside in the contingency.

More road diets! These are needed in every neighborhood. 1-2 arterials a month is a decent pace right now. A cheap way to make much needed incremental improvements.

The “Existing” picture is incorrect. There are currently sharrows on this section of Admiral Way (both North and South) — although I acknowledge that you'd have to have a deathwish to ride your bike in the “sharrows” lane up the hill Northbound.

More to say, but for now I'll just say that this proposal is not very well thought through — particularly as it impacts bus transit times.

Why would it impact buses? Because of stops the average speed of an in-city bus route is something like 17 mph. That's one reason that even the hybrids get pathetic gas mileage (about 3 mpg).

The only downside I see to this is removing the second downhill lane prevents morning commuters trying to get to Avalon from bypassing the backup that sometimes stretches most of the way up the hill. Construction on Spokane in Sodo and the the future AWV construction will make those back-ups more likely.

Well, since the SDOT can't do anything about the hills and 150 annual rain days that make bicycling unrealistic for most people, they're just gonna go out of their way to f**k up traffic as much as possible in the (vain) hope that they can force people out of their cars…..

Comparisons between Stone Way and Nickerson are misguided. Anyone who's lived in this city knows that getting east-west is a frustrating time-suck. North-south arterials, especially around Wallingford, have not been as much of an issue. Ergo, the Stone Way road diet was barely noticed. Such a poor argument.

Sigh.

Because on the Southbound section of Admiral Way, the buses currently go down the hill in the right hand lane while the left hand lane backs up all the way up the hill. Then, at the bottom of the hill just before the on-ramp to the West Seattle Bridge the buses merge into the single (left) lane of traffic heading over the bridge. With this traffic pattern in place, buses can go down the hill faster than cars during rush hour.

Then, when buses get on the bridge there is an HOV lane. Taken together, during heavy traffic (i.e., morning rush hour), buses have some time and traffic advantages.

With the Proposed traffic pattern, buses will be stuck in the single lane of Southbound traffic with everyone else waiting to get on the West Seattle Bridge.

…and since 17% of Seattle residents use public transit for their commutes vs. the 2.5% who ride bikes, clearly SDOT has to screw the transit users….

This is a great idea, but they need to remove the uphill parking. It is currently only used by people selling their cars.

As a long time west seattle resident I would observe that this is not a heavily used bike corridor. Lots of bikes down along the water, which is flat, but Admiral Way climbs a long hill on both east and west approaches to California. Marginal idea proposed for a stupid location.

I used to come into town for concerts, events, home shows. But your road diets have accomplished their mission. I don't come into town anymore. At least not with kids in tow. You obviously don't need my business.

Nope, we don't. We're doing just fine on our own. We welcome you, if you want to come have an urban experience with the family, but if you're that upset about sharing streets, free to stay home. You won't really be missed.