Over the past three months, thousands of Seattleites have enjoyed a car-free section of Lake Washington Boulevard (LWB) each weekend. The inadequately titled “Bicycle Weekends” program closes 3 miles of lakefront roadway to cars so everyone can walk, bike, roll, and play along the water. Mayor Wilson expanded the program this year to include every weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day (excluding one weekend for Seafair). The previous Mayoral administration picked ten seemingly random weekends each summer.
Thanks to the consistent and expanded schedule, Lake Washington Boulevard is busy every weekend. As someone who lives near this stretch of LWB, I’ve had the privilege of observing hundreds of happy and relaxed Seattleites of all ages and abilities enjoy this park each weekend. I have personally visited the lakefront more than previous years because I no longer need to check a schedule to see if it will be car-free on a given day.
The schedule change has also reduced the number of drivers who drive around the barriers onto LWB. One possible reason for this is drivers now know to avoid LWB every weekend. In previous years, someone may have planned their route to include LWB, only to find out it was closed to cars when they were en-route. Some drivers made the reckless decision to drive past the barriers anyway. To be clear, this does not pertain to residents, guests, and deliveries going to houses on LWB from the nearest intersection.
To celebrate this incredible community resource, Seattle Streets Alliance, Bike Works, and Outdoors For All are hosting the Lake WA Blvd Bash next Saturday, August 15. The event will feature live music, food, games, and more at the Ferdinand St boat launch (10-15 minute walk north of Seward Park). More details are available here.
In addition to next Saturday, Lake Washington Boulevard will be car-free every weekend until Labor Day.
This is an open thread.
Would like to understand when mayors office will advance permanent one-way with real barriers.
Weekend only is OK, but has some seriously unsafe exceptions and interactions with aggro drivers.
The City recently installed steel gates at several LWB locations. The ugly temporary barriers are no longer needed.
Those gates are for full closure and not one-way operation.
I’d feel better about permanent one way barriers if I knew it were in addition to, rather than instead of full closures on weekends. The waterfront walk is just so much more pleasant without cars speeding by, and one way doesn’t fix that.
I’ve been seeing Fare Enforcement more often at Link stations and on trains lately. Our car from Bellevue to Seattle got boarded and checked a few days ago. We happened to get off at the same tunnel station, so I asked them, in general, how what percentage of riders pay the fare? They didn’t quite answer that question, but they did say how many riders in our car had valid fare, and the answer was 92%. He even held up his fare-checking device and showed me the screen, and how it logs each fare check, and shows if it’s valid fare or not. He even scrolled down the list showing me all the fare checks. There were different colored dots next to each check. I think green for valid, and then a couple of other colors for not valid, and some other category I didn’t catch.
92% is higher than I expected.
As far as I can tell, Sound Transit never made public the investigation results of the June 2024 route 545 bus crash on 5th Ave.
Apparently Amtrak Cascades service is disrupted due to a building fire in Portland? Need to find more detailed information.
More info: https://amtrakcascades.com/alerts/service-disruption-between-seattle-and-portland/
The fire happened on Sunday.
Or something in it caught fire again?
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2026/08/02/fire-collapses-all-eight-stories-of-vacant-centennial-mills/
There are contrinued concerns the building will collapse into the surrounding area. All 8 floors of the interior are gone, so it’s only a shell.
So, things may be disrupted for a while.
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2026/08/amtrak-trains-between-portland-and-seattle-sidelined-indefinitely-as-centennial-mills-heads-toward-demolition.html
What do the green quarter circles on the Link arrival screens mean?
That it’s being tracked live via ST’s train dispatch software to give accurate up to date information as to how far the train is from the station.
Thanks, I thought it was something like that. Not very useful especially since hardly anyone knows what it means. Virtually all the trains have this so it would be a better user interface if they dropped an icon nobody knows or cares about. FWIW, it’s not all that accurate anyway. It almost always over states the time for the next train after the last one leaves the platform. I guess better to under promise and over deliver but… real time? When it says more than 10 minutes it almost always gets shortened until the point that only times <6minutes are accurate. And then there’s the somewhat rare occurrence when the time increases. Then the green icon is still there but meaningless. This happens when there is a disruption in the system. Sure the software knows where the train is but it has no clue as to how long is going to take to clear the issue and get to the station. But the green icon is still there because the system knows where the train is. Leave this field blank until the train is actually past the previous stop and arrival time is pretty certain. They could also drop the 2 minute warning that blanks out all the other info. Keep the screen showing arrival times for “all trains” instead of changing the text to what they are saying over the LOUD speaker. No green icon but add a red X when there is a known issue.
The green semi circles are industry standard for all transit systems that have live tracking. If the GTFS live feed is down for Metro, you’ll see just an estimated time in whatever app without the tracking symbol.
The displays are to inform the public, not to inform the train operators. 99.9% of the public has never heard of this icon. I didn’t until I asked here. If ST wants average readers to think it’s anything more than useless decoration, it needs to explain it somewhere on a sign. It has a network map and station-area signs on the wall: it could put it there.
Mike this is a world standard. It’s useful for people who know/use transit regularly and people who don’t care won’t care to look it up.
It would be nice if ST had something similar to this though: https://www.transitchicago.com/howto/trackerexplained/
“Mike this is a world standard.”
The green running man is an international standard for emergency exit, but I didn’t recognize it when I encountered it in Germany: I thought it meant “elevator going down”. (He’s walking to what must be an elevator door because what else could it be, and there’s an arrow pointing down.) These displays are deployed at Seattle subway stations, where average users don’t know much about transit or international icons, and many don’t use transit apps. It’s the agency’s responsibility to recognize what its target audience knows and to explain symbols they don’t know.