This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
9th Avenue in South Lake Union was restriped over the weekend, and is now a two-way street with bike lanes in either direction.
This is the complement to Westlake Avenue, which also went two-way recently. Bicyclists who were getting stuck in the streetcar tracks on Westlake can now use 9th instead and have their own dedicated lane.
I’m all for more two-way streets in Seattle. Except for downtown (and maybe the Roosevelt Ave-11th Ave NE combo in the U District), the traffic doesn’t really justify these wide, 3-lane one-way streets. They encourage speeding and bad driving. Just the other day, I was heading south on 9th Ave when another driver ahead of me decided to slowly drift across all three empty lanes — no turn signal, of course — right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and we came with inches of crashing.