How Seattle got a partly ‘European-style’ street

“How close can we get to a European-style pedestrian-oriented street?” Grace Crunican asked in 2003 when she was director of the Seattle Department of Transportation.

At that time, the City was overseeing plans for extensive redevelopment of a faded industrial neighborhood near Lake Union, north of downtown. Crunican looked at Terry Avenue North—an irregularly paved street that sloped down toward the lake—and envisioned it as a place where pedestrians and motor vehicles could comfortably coexist. It could be a “heart location”—a social hub—in billionaire Paul Allen’s emerging South Lake Union mixed-use district.

The story of Terry Avenue North appears as a case study in Living Streets: Strategies for Crafting Public Space, newly published by Wiley (334 pages, $85 hardcover). Better! Cities & Towns followed up on the book’s release by talking with Lesley Bain, one of the three authors, and with Lyle Bicknell, chief urban designer for the Department of Planning and Redevelopment on the street project.

Around the world, interest is growing in how to create and manage streets where pedestrians and vehicles can mingle without tension. Crunican thought the six blocks of Terry could be a model of that for Seattle. She collaborated with varied interests, including Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate and Weinstein A|U Architects + Urban Designers, where Bain is an architect, urban designer, and principal.

Terry Avenue was a low-volume, non-arterial street, which made it an appropriate candidate for mixing vehicular traffic and people on foot. It was unusually wide by Seattle standards—71 to 76 feet—and the atmosphere was casual enough that trucks in the street sometimes parked perpendicular to the old buildings. Lacking sidewalks, pedestrians walked in the street—a patchwork of asphalt and century-old bricks. It “already functioned in some ways as a shared-use street,” Bain and her co-authors, Barbara Gray and Dave Rodgers, write. Old railroad tracks, remnants of a disused freight railway spur, contributed to the street’s industrial atmosphere.

As Bain and her co-authors tell it, the City was eager to retain that atmosphere while narrowing the vehicular portion of the street, overseeing installation of new amenities, and watching new offices be erected for companies such as the Internet retailer Amazon. After community outreach—including interviews with property owners and tenants, public open houses, meetings with neighborhood groups, operation of a city-sponsored website, and input from the City’s Design Commission—guidelines were developed for making Terry Avenue a social hub.

Designing the street

The design, created in conjunction with property owners, who paid for most of the new features, called for widening the sidewalks on the east side of the street and creating plazas and planted areas in part of the right-of-way. This new, largely pedestrian zone was given a generous width, 31 feet. At intervals, parking clusters were inserted into the pedestrian zone, but no more than five parking spaces were allowed in each cluster, so that cars wouldn’t dominate.

The vehicular travel area was narrowed to a width of 23 feet—enough to accommodate two traffic lanes, including the South Lake Union route of the Seattle Streetcar. The streetcar began operating in December 2007, using new tracks laid into the street. The old freight tracks, which had given the street some of its industrial, utilitarian character, unfortunately couldn’t be used for the streetcar, and they were seen as a hazard for bicyclists. “There was an attempt to preserve the tracks,” Bicknell says. “In the end, it wasn’t conceivable.”

The west side of the street was given a more conventional design consisting of sidewalks 9 to 14 feet wide, a row of street trees, a 6-inch curb, and parallel parking.

“Material choice is critical in creating a pedestrian street,” Living Streets’ authors emphasize. Materials have to reassure people that it’s okay to walk in the street. Bicknell describes the bricks with which the street was paved around 1890 as a classic Seattle dark red-brown with chamfered edges—distinctive and desirable. The guidelines were written to try to retain as much of Terry Avenue’s existing brick paving as possible.

Ultimately, however, the old bricks, like the old tracks, were removed—it was simpler and less expensive to pave the travel lanes with asphalt. “We had hoped they would put brick between the [new] streetcar tracks,“ Bain says. But that, too, would have increased the cost to the City—a problem, given today’s tight municipal budgets. Thus concrete was used there instead. The authors regret the dominance of asphalt in the travel lanes; they say it undercuts the sense of Terry being a shared-use street.

Another complicating factor was the Americans with Disabilities Act. “You have to make sure that people with disabilities [particularly those with poor eyesight] don’t end up in the midst of car traffic,” Bain points out. This makes it difficult to build streets without a conspicuous divider between the pedestrian and vehicular zones.

Ultimately, a curb just two inches high, was installed on portions of the street’s east side. This minimal curb gives visually impaired people a way of identifying the end of the pedestrian zone and the beginning of the travel lanes. Bain is pleased with the low curb, and with the planting of free-standing trees in certain locations; they’ll grow much larger than would a row of standard street trees hemmed in by a sidewalk. The big trees should make for a more satisfying streetscape.

“We wanted to preserve the grittiness of the street,” Bicknell says. However, the large new buildings that have been constructed in the past few years tend to offset the rough older character. The chief tenant in the approximately three-block stretch that’s been completed so far is Amazon. “Amazon may not have been eager for a gritty character,” Bicknell acknowledges. The company may have wanted more of a corporate presence.

Bain concurs: “Grit is hard to keep,” especially in a development like South Lake Union, where new buildings have been gone up quickly—much faster than anticipated. The remaining blocks of Terry will be redeveloped as developers identify demand for additional office space.

Because of the compromises that were made, Terry Avenue falls short of the original objective. “It isn’t the truly shared street we were aiming for,” says Bicknell, “but it functions well. It’s lively. There are restaurants. Office workers are using it.” The pedestrian plazas have proven popular. “On a sunny lunch hour or a pleasant evening, it works,” he says.

The design also features pedestrian passages that link Terry to other parts of South Lake Union.

The book

A chief purpose of Living Streets is to encourage designers to see streets as “more than just places to drive.” The book explores how intelligent street planning can create good places for living, working, and playing; strengthen community interaction; encourage healthier ways of life; develop local economies; and promote urban patterns that are less dependent on fossil fuels.

Written for engineers, transportation planners, landscapes architects, and urban planners, it includes advice on curbless parking, context-sensitive road design, woonerfs, reclaiming underused rights-of-way, and the creation of effective environments for walking, biking, and public transit, among other subjects. It lays out opportunities for incorporating natural systems—with rain gardens, trees, and other plantings—into street rights-of-way.

Gray manages the Transportation Systems Design and Planning group for the Seattle DOT. Rodgers is a principal at SvR Design Company, which worked on green aspects of Seattle’s High Point HOPE VI redevelopment, winner of a 2007 EPA National Award for Smart Growth.