Dave Amos of City Beautiful recently visited Seattle’s new Overlook Walk pedestrian bridge and appears to have fallen in love, as his video title puts it up there as one of the best pedestrian bridges ever. Amos gives it high marks for the seamless, scenic connection it creates between Pike Place Market and the expanded Seattle Aquarium and the high quality public spaces it creates along the way. It’s big step up in pedestrian infrastructure and park space.
Not everything about the new Seattle Waterfront Park worked out perfectly. The waterfront bike facility turned out narrower than originally promised and is delayed and yet to open. The wide surface-level Alaskan Way highway partially recreates the barrier that was removed by tearing down the hulking Alaskan Way Viaduct.
Civic boosters have sought to make the four-billion-dollar SR 99 tunnel they dug under downtown as inevitable and a prerequisite for the waterfront improvements, overlooking the viable grassroots effort to remove the viaduct and use transit, bike, and pedestrian improvements to carry the load instead of more highways. Tying the project to the SR-99 Tunnel also delayed it by many years, which was greatly exacerbated by the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine breaking down, forcing a multi-year effort to extract and repair it.
There’s also the issue of the failure to pedestrianize Pike Place — despite wide public support — which means people drawn to the Overlook Walk are shunted into an unsafe and unnecessarily car-choked street.
Nonetheless, the Overlook Walk is a shiny example of the good that come of investing in pedestrian infrastructure and placemaking. We should do it far more often. The end result is spectacular and will be beloved for many generations.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrianizing streets, blanketing the city in bus lanes, and unleashing a mass timber building spree to end the affordable housing shortage and avert our coming climate catastrophe. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in East Fremont and loves to explore the city on his bike.