Rainier Avenue road diet is the right response to calm a wild traffic corridor.
A road diet will make people who use Rainier Avenue South safer, but not necessarily happier.
Rainier is one of a number of roadways in and around Seattle that have required re-engineering in places to make them safer. This time Seattle will make changes to a 3½-mile stretch of Rainier through Columbia City that’s notorious for heavy traffic, speeding and collisions.
Dealing with traffic in a congested city is challenging whether you’re driving, cycling, walking or even taking mass transit, whether you’re out for leisure or business, trying to get someplace or trying to park someplace.
Maybe you’ve been stuck trying to drive through Wallingford on 45th Street, or tried to bypass I-5 south during the morning commute and spent time crawling down Eastlake Avenue toward downtown. There are traffic jams in just about every neighborhood.
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I use Rainier frequently, and like a lot of people in Rainier Valley, I’m not sure I’ll like all the consequences of the change, but I do think it’s necessary and the right choice.
Early in the process, I wasn’t sure what should be done. I went to one of the first neighborhood meetings about the street to get a sense of the community’s wishes, but that didn’t help much. A passionate defense of the needs of motorists would be followed by an equally impassioned plea for more attention to the needs of cyclists. Every point elicited a counterpoint, and there was a lot of emotion in the room.
Some people said more policing was the answer to safety problems. Corral the knuckleheads who don’t cross in the crosswalks, they said, along with the ones who speed or don’t know how to drive.
The city’s plan for Rainier will include reducing traffic along that stretch around and through Columbia City from four lanes to two with a turn lane in the center, and reducing the speed limit of a mile-long segment from 30 to 25 miles per hour.
The city could also carve out a bicycle lane, or even add bus and bicycle lanes by eliminating some on-street parking. I don’t see how they could make either of those work well on this particularly narrow stretch of Rainier. It would be great if they could, but I don’t see it.
The city is also considering putting barriers in the turn lanes at intervals that would discourage speeders from using the lanes to get around traffic.
Farther north, where Rainier is wider, there are four lanes of traffic and a center turn lane. I was inching north on that section Tuesday morning when I heard a siren. A firetruck was coming up from behind, but all of the lanes were full, so cars couldn’t pull to the side. Because the center lane has no barrier islands, the truck was able to use it to bypass the clogged traffic.
Whatever the final configuration of Rainier, lots of people worry that if traffic moves substantially more slowly, some drivers will switch to other roads to go north and south and move the safety problems elsewhere, primarily to Martin Luther King Jr. Way or to Wilson Avenue South/50th Avenue South.
I already stay clear of Rainier for most trips north. Sometimes, I drive along Lake Washington Boulevard, which is visually pleasant, but challenging in its own way at times. The lake route draws lots of cyclists, for obvious reasons. Sometimes drivers and cyclists play nicely together, but other times they don’t.
In this rapidly growing city, moving around is likely to get harder before more and better transit options make it easier. Denser neighborhoods tend to have the most convenient transit because there has to be high density to support frequent and efficient mass transit. I’ve been told Rainier Valley is not yet dense enough for the kind of transit I’d like to see. The area seems to be in an intermediate stage, dense enough to make getting around a hassle, but not dense enough for the kind of transit infrastructure that would woo more people out of their cars. (Better east-west transit would get more people to the light-rail line that runs north and south on Martin Luther King Jr. for instance.)
Some cities are better at managing transportation than others. Some cities have topography that makes it easier than others, but they all have problems and those problems all have solutions that may satisfy one party but are likely to annoy another.
The only absolute way to reduce the pain of congestion would be a population diet, but we don’t want that. Be safe, and look for happiness someplace other than the road.