Since 1947, Everett’s Funko Stadium has held everything from AquaSox games to grade school baseball games – but times are changing. The AquaSox are the High-A minor league affiliate of the Seattle Mariners and due to pressure from Major League Baseball to upgrade minor league facilities, AquaSox ownership says now it’s time for a stadium revamp. The league’s new amenity requirements include larger locker rooms, umpire accommodations, more parking, and enhanced seating. The 3,682-seat Funko Field does not meet these standards. 

The city had three options: renovate, build a new stadium, or do nothing. 

Everett chose the second option. On the eve of the new year, December 2024, the Everett City Council unanimously chose a site east of Angel of the Winds Arena — at the corner of Broadway and Pacific, right next to the Sounder rail line. 

As of June 2025, the project is in full swing and hoping to break ground in early 2026. The city is planning to tap Bayley Construction to build the new stadium. 

“The Outdoor Event Center is a key piece of our plan to grow Everett the right way – with more housing, better access to transit and a more vibrant, walkable downtown. It’s about bringing people together, creating new opportunities and growing our local economy to support the quality of life and robust public services our residents deserve,” Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin said. 

The City plans on spending $4.8 million to advance the (OEC) Outdoor Event Center stadium project to the shovel-ready stage. The City forecasts contributing a total of about $8 million toward construction and has budgeted an additional $20 million to acquire 15 properties needed to clear room for the facility. It’s likely some business relocation assistance and possible eminent domain will be needed, the City said. 

Some opponents of the new stadium are using a “No Frogs Downtown” slogan, referring to the AquaSox mascot. Legend says iconic mascot Weebly is a cross between a Pacific Tree Frog and a Central American red eyed tree frog. In a port town that can be soggy and gray, the logo is a nod to Everett’s amphibious identity.

Proponents argue the city risks losing the AquaSox team to another city with a newer stadium if they do not build the new stadium. And the transit-rich location helps Mariners fans from across the region see prospects play before they reach the big leagues. Fans can also see the franchise’s more advanced minor leaguers at Triple A team Tacoma Rainiers, the last stop before the majors.

With a price tag projected at $82 million or more, will the benefits of a brand new stadium outweigh the costs and how does the public feel about the project? And is it the best use of the land chosen, among the most transit rich areas of downtown Everett?

City promises revitalization and year-round activation 

The Franklin administration is all in on the stadium.

“At its core, this is an economic development project. Losing the AquaSox would have a negative economic impact on our community. A new facility downtown that can host baseball, soccer, concerts and other events, plus include a public park, has significant positive benefits – not just economically but also for the quality of life of our residents.” said Simone Tarver, spokesperson for the City of Everett. 

For the City of Everett, this is more than a passion project; it’s been their mission for the last several years. “It’s what we think about when we wake up,” said Dan Eernissee, economic development director at the City of Everett. 

To its backers, the proposed ballpark would be an investment in the future, contributing to downtown revitalization. The City is also hoping to use the new stadium to attract a minor-level pro soccer team, potentially both men’s and women’s. “The United Soccer League already is intending to be a big part of the project,” Tarver said. 

Everett council envisions over 100 days of annual use, including concerts, soccer matches, and festivals.

“106 outdoor events will dovetail well year-round,” Eernissee said. He added that the stadium will serve as a public park and community space, potentially including a dog park on the edge of the property. “tThe OEC will most definitely have a park element” Tarver says, “As density increases so do people with dogs.”

 “Do you know how many people in Everett have dogs?” Eernissee said. “50% of people in multifamily housing developments have a dog these days!” 

For businesses near the proposed site — between Hewitt and Pacific Avenues — the stadium means potential foot traffic, tourism, and a new wave of investment.

“It’s going to make Everett an all seasonal destination,” Eernissee said. “Now these businesses can provide pizza all year round, like Broadway Pizza could even start seasonal specials.” 

But where is the money coming from to fund such a venture? 

Questions about cost, transparency, and displacement

The stadium’s projected cost — budgeted at $82 million — has raised eyebrows. Everett’s Stadium Fiscal Advisory Committee released a report that said the downtown site would be the “most fiscally beneficial option” in the long-run, despite greater upfront costs, pegged between $102 million to $133 million.

The funding for the new Everett stadium is set to come from a mix of public and private sources and use a public-private partnership model. The plan suggests transferring project delivery to a third-party non-profit facilitator and recommends using Public Facilities Group as that facilitator.

The City’s “target budget” projects a $82 million, but they admit that a full picture of costs will not emerge until the design is finalized. The higher earlier estimate could indicate costs will rise.

• $42 million for hard construction costs.
• $20 million for soft costs (e.g., design, permits, taxes, fees, and contingency). 
• $20 million for property acquisition.

The City of Everett is committing around $7 million, potentially from capital improvement and park impact fees, while state and county support may include a $7.4 million infrastructure grant from Washington State and a $5 million contribution from Snohomish County. The AquaSox have pledged $10 million to the new stadium, and the City is hoping to secure $10 million from the United Soccer League. 

“Until design is closer to complete, we won’t have the final cost. The most recent approvals from Council provided funding to get design to 60% at which point we will have a more complete picture of the costs to share with the Council as well as our community,” Tarver said. 

To cover the majority of construction costs, it’s likely that the City will issue revenue-backed bonds, with repayment tied to stadium-generated income such as leases and ticket surcharges.

Eernissee says that the stadium is part of a larger marketing strategy for the future, while also trying to get ahead of the real estate bubble itself. 

“This is likely an area where there will be a lot of market pressure to develop,” Eernissee said. “Before the market rates get too high we’re trying to get a high enough facility that it’s appropriate for an urban center.”

Transit complement or impediment? 

The City contends that the new stadium aligns with Everett’s overall strategy of increasing public transport and development within the downtown area. 

“Sound Transit will work hand in hand with our city team,” Tarver said. “We anticipate this area will be close to a light rail station in the future.” 

And while the Everett Link extension isn’t expected until 2037 at the earliest (or 2041 if Sound Transit cost control and realignment efforts don’t go well), the city is already taking steps to prepare for it. 

“We’re still in the planning phase, so those specific decisions haven’t been made yet. Right now we are in the middle of Everett Transit’s Long Range Plan online open house to solicit input from the community on how transit services should evolve between now and 2044. Public input is such an important part of that,” Tarver said.

Downtown Everett’s future light rail station is expected to be sited near the existing Sounder station, which would put the light rail stop in close proximity to the proposed stadium. Sound Transit’s preferred option is just west of the existing transit center, but Alternative D would overlap with the stadium site. If light rail is ever extended farther north, having two stadiums bookending Broadway could prove to be an obstacle for siting a path for the extension.

Transit boosters have argued that high-density housing should be the top priority within a short walk of light rail, given the huge investment the region is making and the incredible transit access those areas will have.

Everett upzoned its downtown core in 2018, allowing 25-story towers in some areas — though highrises have yet to materialize and Everett’s population has grown slowly compared to its peer cities in the region. The proposed stadium site is in that 25-story highrise zone with a buildable square footage of 3 million. 

While the stadium would negate the site’s housing capacity, the City seems to be banking on the project being a catalyst to spur redevelopment elsewhere in the downtown core.

Property acquisition and displacement

The land the stadium is set to build upon is currently the site of some retail businesses, but most of the site is made up of older auto repair shops and specialty businesses. 

Of the local businesses still operating there, most owners are actually in support of the plan, even if it means possible displacement. 

“Stadiums are always good,” said John, a cashier at Chevron. He was made aware of the city’s plans when they did a survey, and he said his coworkers are in support. 

Eernissee says they plan to offer all of the businesses displaced leases elsewhere in Downtown Everett. 

“There’s a process to follow here. We are doing our part in following that prescribed process,” Eernissee said.

This process typically includes feasibility studies, environmental reviews, public meetings, and formal approvals from city and state agencies. It also involves finalizing funding agreements — such as bonds, grants, and private investments — alongside competitive bidding for design and construction. 

Criticism of stadium subsidies 

As a publicly funded economic development tool, stadiums have drawn criticism for often falling short of their economic promises. In 1997, two Brooking Institute researchers — Andrew Zimbalist and Roger G. Noll — wrote a book raising the alarm that publicly funded stadiums were a bad investment and failed to live up to their rosy projections, but the practice has persisted relatively unabated.

“A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment,” they wrote. “No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues. Regardless of whether the unit of analysis is a local neighborhood, a city, or an entire metropolitan area, the economic benefits of sports facilities are de minimus.”

Even when stadiums spur significant redevelopment, they have drawn criticism for furthering displacement and siphoning money away from social infrastructure. For example, Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., was a publicly funded MLB stadium that ultimately cost $693 million by the time it was completed in 2008. Built to anchor redevelopment in the Navy Yard, it did spur real estate investment and boost tourism, but it also drew criticism for relying heavily on public money and failing to address housing affordability or racial equity concerns. 

Located in a retail and warehouse area, Everett’s stadium will not directly displace residents. “The good thing about this project is that there’s no residents affected,” Eernissee said. 

The City has pledged to uplift existing communities and support local businesses, promising it could be a massive boon for the city. 

As a minor league stadium, the scale of investment is smaller than big league parks, but similar risks exist. If the stadium and associated redevelopment only results in benefits for sports team and rich investors, or if it becomes a long-time liability sapping City resources, it may go down in history as a boondoggle. 

What community members are saying

Residents have raised a few different arguments against the new stadium build, the most prominent being relocation of small businesses. 

“I’m incredibly annoyed that the stadium isn’t being entirely privately funded. Who asked for this? It’s fine where it is. Meanwhile we don’t have any park rangers in the city and our library services have been cut,” an Everett resident complained on Reddit. 

But Tarver says that these are misconceptions. 

“There are some major misconceptions about this project, like what funding the City would be using, the idea that this funding could bring back park rangers (it couldn’t), that this adds to the structural deficit (it doesn’t), and why Funko Field isn’t a viable option,” said Tarver. 

Some Everett residents shared the fear the new stadium could ramp up displacement pressure and change the neighborhood. 

“The proposed site is in the middle of a historic district.” said Louley, an Everett local, when asked in an online poll about the community’s idea of the new project. “In the past 20 years, this neighborhood has completely turned itself around. We are a tight-knit community that looks out for each other, as well as the large unhoused population that travel through on a daily basis.”

“Putting a sports stadium in the middle of our neighborhood is going to undo EVERYTHING. North Everett has really been leading the positive changes in the city, but because historically this was a ‘slum,’” Louley added. “The entire county wants to raze us to the ground.” 

On the other hand, some Everett residents back the project and favor out with the old, in with the new. Sverre is one such Everett resident. 

“I think long term it will be great for the city,” Sverre said. “The current facility is owned by the school district, and its priority is for student use. Players have to cross the football then up the hill to even get to the locker room or trainers offices, which are the EHS football team locker rooms. They haven’t been updated in 50 years, and are massively outdated, even for high school sports use, let alone professional athletes. It would cost way too much to upgrade Funko field to meet new MLB standards, and it still wouldn’t be owned by the team or city.” 

Beyond improving the stadium experience, Sverre sees the project as furthering the revitalization of downtown: “This new stadium is going to connect downtown Everett’s core, with the east side of Broadway, which has fallen in disrepair and is mainly older manufacture type buildings and old warehouses. It will bring a large amount of new urban housing and commercial spaces that will link up with the Everett Transit Center. This is also where the downtown light rail station will be built. I know future development will follow.” 

Looking forward

As Everett pushes forward with its vision for a modern, multipurpose stadium, the project stands at a crossroads between transformation and tension. For some, it represents long-overdue progress—an investment in economic development, public amenities, and city pride. For others, it raises concerns about displacement, equity, and whether the return will truly match the cost.

At the end of the day, one thing is clear: this isn’t just about baseball. It’s about identity and the kind of future Everett wants to build. With construction slated to begin in 2026 and a completion date eyed for 2027, the stadium is beginning to look like a done deal, but it will be a test of the city’s planning prowess and commitment to inclusivity, transparency, and thoughtful urban growth to ensure it’s a success.

The post Everett Forges Ahead with Downtown Stadium for Minor League Sports first appeared on The Urbanist.

Traffic at the station is expected to grow following a revamp of Memorial Stadium, building on the momentum of an overhauled Climate Pledge Arena and the myriad other event venues at Seattle Center that add significant demand on the 0.9-mile monorail.

The update is badly needed. Seattle Center Station remains much as it did in 1962, with only small tweaks for the modern era. The only Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant way for wheelchair users to access the station is by entering the Seattle Center Armory and using the pedestrian bridge to get to the monorail, and the station platform itself doesn’t have level boarding onto the trains.

In contrast, the Seattle Monorail’s southern terminus in downtown was completely rebuilt with the construction of Westlake Mall in the mid-1980s, and received another revamp in 2020 to better accommodate increased passenger flow, just in time for the line’s 60th anniversary.

The project’s current schedule means upgrades won’t be fully complete in time for the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, which includes a planned “celebration site” at the Seattle Center Campus and some of the biggest crowds the campus has seen in decades. This fall, the City of Seattle started the process of selecting a general contractor who will oversee the finalization of design and the construction process, with construction not actually set to start until summer of 2026, according to procurement documents.

In the meantime, monorail riders will be faced with a fare increase starting in 2025 that will up the price for one trip to $4, making the short line one of the most expensive transit trips in town.

The preferred concept for Seattle Center station upgrades, developed after engaging a consultant on several different alternatives over recent months, is similar to concepts for reconfiguration examined in the past. A full rebuild of the monorail’s main entrance onto Thomas Street will remove an awkward bottleneck, with a new stairway entrance, a ramp, and an ADA-compliant ramp all providing a way to access the station.

The City of Seattle is looking at additional, longer-term changes to the Thomas Street corridor, which includes several small retail stores near the monorail entrance. Ultimately, an ADA ramp that doesn’t include any sharp turns is envisioned, but not immediately planned for implementation. The primary east-west pedestrian corridor through Seattle Center, Thomas Street, has a lot of potential that will be enhanced with better access to the monorail station.

Inside the station, an uncovered extension of the platform will create more room to accommodate crowds, and the platform itself will be realigned to allow level boarding onto the two monorail trains, one of the biggest accessibility upgrades included here.

On the north side of the station, a new elevator will provide direct access for riders heading to and from Memorial Stadium, which is set to reorient itself with a new Seattle Center-focused “front porch” — in strong contrast with today when most visitors enter off 5th Avenue N. Along the Armory building, the stairway leading up to the pedestrian bridge will be rebuilt to handle larger crowds.

So, what ideas were examined and discarded? Another alternative looked at rebuilding the pedestrian bridge, which is well below standard height, preventing Seattle Center maintenance vehicles from being able to use the Nob Hill Avenue pathway. A new stairway directly onto ground level heading north would have provided better access to Memorial Stadium. But this concept providing fewer improvements around passenger flow and came with a higher price tag.

As part of the improvement study, consultant HDR looked at another issue facing the monorail: is it better to load passengers onto trains from the center platform at Seattle Center or from the sides? With center loading, passengers can board onto either of the two trains, but the space on the center platform is more limited. After modelling passenger flow, the study concluded side-loading would mean the system could handle larger crowds, as long as there are line managers in place to tell passengers which entrance to use.

Counterintuitively, the study found that reducing train headways and increasing the number of passengers on each train is the only way that the system will be able to accommodate close to its maximum capacity of carrying 5,000 riders in a single hour. Those models assumed both trains arriving at four-minute headways, which each four-car train able to handle just under 300 passengers.

Ultimately, it will be up to Seattle Monorail Services, the private company that operates the monorail, to implement procedural changes like this. But with a potential NBA team at Climate Pledge Arena on the horizon, the City of Seattle is banking on the monorail’s people-moving capacity.

Throughout all of these upgrades, monorail service is not expected to be significantly disrupted, with construction crews working around the schedule of what’s become a vital tool to handle big Seattle Center events. If all goes according to plan, officials will be able to cut the ribbon on these upgrades by fall of 2027.

The post A First Look at Seattle Center Monorail Station’s Planned Access Upgrades first appeared on The Urbanist.

Walking around in Seattle Center and the neighborhood surrounding it, you quickly realize that one of the city’s largest pedestrian-only spaces has a lot of untapped potential.

One morning in early October, I explored Seattle Center and the area around it with Debi Frausto, an activist with the Uptown Alliance, a community-based group that promotes transit, density, and pedestrian access. On an hour-long walk we examined the site of Sound Transit’s preferred alternative for the Seattle Center Link station, wandered Uptown’s sidewalks and pondered what a truly pedestrian-oriented future for Seattle Center could look like.

Near the entrance to McCaw Hall, for instance, we admired the elegant arcade that provides a refuge from the noise and traffic on Mercer Street. 

“This is a nice entrance for people coming through,” Frausto said. “But where are they coming from? They’re coming from a parking garage.”

This is the strange irony of Seattle Center: The city’s artistic and cultural hub is an almost exclusively pedestrian-only space, and yet it’s also one surrounded by busy infrastructure for cars. It doesn’t help that the site, which got its start as the 1962 World’s Fair, was originally designed as a gated, ticketed space.

In the decades since the World’s Fair closed, Seattle Center has tried to become more integrated into the Uptown neighborhood – with mixed success.

“One of our big goals for this campus is that the boundaries between the edges of the community become blurred and we get more integration between them,” said Marshall Foster, the new director of Seattle Center, who was recently confirmed unanimously by the Seattle City Council on September 27.

With 17 years of experience with the City, most recently as director of the Office of the Waterfront, Foster has big ambitions for Seattle Center. In the next few years, he’ll have plenty of challenges to keep him busy, including a major renovation of Memorial Stadium, finding a new use for the KCTS building after its tenants vacate next year, updating the monorail station to ADA standards, and creating a long-term strategic plan.

In addition, the debate in the past year over Sound Transit’s proposed Link station has helped clarify what’s at stake for the neighborhood and cultural institutions on the Seattle Center campus such as KEXP, Seattle’s most renowned radio station.

Foster says that over the past year Seattle Center forged an alliance with KEXP and the youth music and arts center, Vera Project, to express concerns about Sound Transit’s original preferred station proposal announced in January 2022, which would have been located at Republican Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue. Both KEXP and Vera Project raised alarms that construction noise and vibration would doom their current locations, and in response to a campaign of opposition, Sound Transit revised its preferred option for the station, moving it a block west to Queen Anne Avenue and 1st Avenue. The location means a longer walk for Seattle Center patrons, but tenants hope for a less disruptive construction period.

Fitting in with its focus on mitigating construction impacts across the Ballard Link line, the Harrell administration took the side of KEXP and other Seattle Center stakeholders and supported the new station alternative.

“To their credit, we actually got their attention,” Foster said. “They were willing to sit down and willing to do the hard work.”

Along with the three other late-addition station alternatives that Harrell supported for shifting Denny Station north and skipping Midtown and Chinatown, the changes to the plan mean that Sound Transit has to complete another Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), which will take at least a year, since the new options did not exist when the original DEIS was released early in 2022.

Relatedly, Ballard Link’s targeted opening date has slipped from its initial 2035 timeline to 2039 at best according to the agency. To make up for lost time, Sound Transit has authorized preliminary engineering work to begin even as nearly half the line is being redesigned and going through the environmental study process anew.

Renovation of Memorial Stadium and an uncertain future for the KCTS building

One aging component of Seattle Center that predates the World’s Fair is Memorial Stadium, built in 1947 and owned by Seattle Public Schools. It’s been long overdue for an overhaul, and on September 27, the Seattle City Council approved a resolution designating $40 million in funds toward Seattle Public Schools’ agreement with the One Roof Partnership to redevelop the stadium into a venue supporting student sports – as well as a space for public events and concerts.  

The Memorial Stadium renovation plan, announced earlier this summer, also includes $66.5 million from Seattle Public Schools’ (SPS) capital levy, as well as a commitment from the One Roof Partnership (comprised of the Kraken, Oak View Group, and the One Roof Foundation) to raise additional funds needed for the $150 million renovation.

On October 4, the Seattle Landmark Preservation Board voted to designate the memorial wall at the stadium – which honors Seattle high school graduates who died in World War II – as a historic landmark. The designation of the wall rather than the entire stadium paves the way for the renovation, which SPS says will be completed by the end of 2027.

“We’ve been trying to get this to happen for a decade,” Foster said. “It’s an unusual partner, one who wants to redevelop Memorial Stadium into a state-of-the-art community stadium. It’s not a big commercial venture like Climate Pledge [Arena].”

A surface parking lot has long disconnected the stadium from the surrounding neighborhood, and Foster is optimistic that the renovation will help transform the northeast corner of Seattle Center into a more welcoming entrance for pedestrians. “We’re very excited to begin to make it more open and porous,” he said.

Another key element in that northeast corner is the Cascade Public Media building, which serves as home to KCTS Channel 9 public television and the online news site Crosscut. With both tenants leaving in early 2024, the city-owned property will likely be used temporarily for storage and warehousing while the City considers options for the property. 

Foster says the City will be deliberate in how it redevelops the site. “It’s probably our best opportunity to create a revenue stream that will support the cultural life of Seattle Center,” Foster said. 

About 65% of Seattle Center’s $47 million annual budget is supported by tenants and events, while about 35% comes from the City’s general fund. 

With city departments under pressure to trim their budgets, the KCTS site presents the most likely possibility to increase revenue for Seattle Center, Foster says. He notes that a hotel, market-rate housing or office/commercial space – in combination with some sort of civic or cultural use, in keeping with Seattle Center’s mission – are all on the table. “Probably not something that gives up ownership but maybe a long-term ground lease.” 

One intriguing possibility that Foster says he’s open to investigating would be to include affordable housing for artists into whatever else happens with the site. This would dovetail nicely with the wide range of cultural organizations that reside at Seattle Center, including the Seattle Repertory Theater, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Seattle Opera. It’s also a good fit with the Uptown neighborhood’s designation as one of the city’s four Arts and Cultural Districts. 

“If you’ve got a band visiting to do a live performance at KEXP and they need a place to rehearse for two or three days, that’s a very hard problem to solve,” Foster said. “Or, what happens when you have a ballet company visiting for two months or three months to do performances and they have to put up 50 dancers?”

The future of light rail and and Uptown’s dense neighborhood

The year-long controversy over the proposal to site the Seattle Center/Uptown Link station adjacent to KEXP has for the most part been resolved, now that Sound Transit reworked its plan to offer as its preferred option the “Republican Shifted West” site – which is currently a Key Bank branch at Queen Anne Avenue. 

Ethan Raup, the new director of KEXP, is relieved that Sound Transit moved its preferred Link station one block west of the radio station’s studios and gathering space, which has become a neighborhood hub. Raup says he still has some concerns about construction impacts and sound and vibration once the light rail station is complete, but he’s optimistic those concerns can be addressed. 

“The tunneling will still cut underneath our building and so ongoing noise and vibrations from trains is a concern. But Sound Transit has a history of and the technology exists to mitigate for that, Raup said. “I feel like we’re on a pretty good path right now.”

Frausto says that the kerfuffle over the Mayor’s now defunct proposal to cut the planned South Lake Union light rail station definitely impacted thinking about how light rail will interact with Seattle Center and the Uptown neighborhood. In addition to offering transfers to Aurora Avenue buses, the South Lake Union station planned at Harrison Street will be important for serving the eastern half of Seattle Center and Uptown. That’s why the Uptown Alliance came out staunchly against abandoning the station, as some Sound Transit boardmembers like Dave Somers had pushed as a cost-cutting measure.

As we walk west on Republican past the KEXP Gathering Space, Frausto notes that some eight blocks of the street will be torn up and cross streets such as First, Second, and Fourth will be blocked during construction – impacting the neighborhood for half a decade or more.

We note the extremely narrow sidewalks at the approach to Seattle Center, which will clearly be inadequate for the crowds of people arriving for concerts, events, or hockey games. Frausto notes that the city’s lauded (but perennially delayed) Thomas Street Redefined project to improve the pedestrian approach to MoPOP and the Space Needle could be a model for this area.  

“You have to ask the question: Where are there other Thomas street-like programs that we can have ready in four years?” she asks.

Foster says Seattle Center’s vision for Republican is an extensive pedestrian-forward route to and from the station, especially for times when thousands of visitors leave Climate Pledge Arena. He says that SDOT director Greg Spotts is open to that possibility. “We’d love to see Republican Street completely transformed into pedestrian use, from the moment you walk off Seattle Center’s campus to the moment you walk on the escalators down to the station.”

Frausto took me further west along Republican, which will be cut-and-cover construction down to Elliott Avenue. She’s concerned Sound Transit hasn’t fully considered impacts to the neighborhood during construction. She also questions whether Sound Transit has enough capacity to move people after an event at Climate Pledge lets out. “They can only move 4,800 people per hour,” she said. “That means they’ll have to queue people, hold them back.”

In another part of the neighborhood we visited the quirky P-patch community garden on the roof of a city-owned parking lot across Mercer from McCaw Hall and Seattle Rep. The building is a money-maker for the city, but Frausto wonders if it could be put to better use. She notes that Climate Pledge, by giving transit passes to ticket-holders, has far surpassed their goals for getting people out of cars. 

“We need housing. We’ve got a full city,” Frausto said, looking out at the Space Needle from the roof of the garage. “Parking and revenue and all that, it’s legit. But this is an opportunity, on City-owned land, right here.”

A block over on Mercer, we walked through a lovely pedestrian pathway in a multi-use space that includes both affordable and market-rate housing – one that could be a model for the parking garage next door. Plymouth Housing’s new housing project at 200 Mercer offers 91 units of permanent supportive housing (and also features the ground floor offices of Path With Art, a nonprofit that provides healing through art for those who have experienced homelessness). In addition, the Center Steps complex offers 269 market-rate units.

Frausto notes that during a recent Sound Transit board meeting, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci told the Uptown Alliance that her neighborhood has already embraced transit oriented development in ways that other neighborhoods near potential Link stations should be emulating.

“We have really embraced that we are an urban center,” Frausto said. “Bring us buses, bring us light rail – if it’s done well.”

One surprisingly important transit link for Seattle Center is the 60-year-old Monorail, which provides a key connection to light rail at Westlake station. Foster notes that thanks to a $15 million federal grant the Monorail will get an upgrade to become fully ADA accessible.

Another long-term improvement Foster is especially interested in on the Seattle Center campus is substantially upgrading pedestrian infrastructure – he notes that many of the walkways that date from the original World’s Fair are asphalt. He points to the “theater commons” approach toward Seattle Rep from 2nd Avenue as a template for the rest of Seattle Center: “It has paving, high quality lighting, high quality landscaping, all done as a system,” he said. “I’d like to see if we could extend that model to the rest of the campus.” 

That of course will require a capital campaign and long-term planning. One of Foster’s immediate goals is to put together a new strategic plan for Seattle Center. Though it has shorter-term planning documents, Seattle Center hasn’t had a major long-term vision document since the Century 21 Master Plan was adopted in 2008.

“I want to end 2024 with a strategic plan for the future,” Foster said. “It’s not going to just deal with the physical setup. We’re talking about programming, and equity will be at the center of it. And sorting out financial sustainability.”

He also sees this year’s successful return of Bumbershoot, on its 50th anniversary as a featured Seattle Arts Festival, to its artistic roots as emblematic of Seattle Center’s potential. Though the Labor Day music festival brought in 40,000 visitors, Foster says the real success was making it more affordable, and centered on quirky, local arts events in addition to bigger acts.

Foster noted that in a city that’s increasingly facing income inequality and polarization over gaps in wealth and opportunity, Seattle Center offers a unique space where everyone in the city comes together.  “We have an opportunity to be a force against that polarization and in helping to bridge that gap.”

The post Will Seattle Center Live Up to Potential as Premier Pedestrianized Space? first appeared on The Urbanist.

Getting home is not nearly as amusing, nor is grabbing a bite on the way. All the good restaurants nearby close early. All the questionable ones close soon after. Following some dead ends and false attempts, we ended up at the stalwart 5 Point Cafe. Forever open, an unblinking recognition that it’s absolutely unique.

I loudly suggested to everyone within earshot that we wouldn’t have so many sleepy weeknights and so few all-hours diners if Seattle would get its act together and hire a night mayor. 

Seattle Does Not Have A Night Mayor

Scott Plusquellec is not Seattle’s night mayor. “I don’t care for that term. It originated in Europe and it’s not something I adhere to. I don’t do what a mayor does and I’m not here to be the arbiter of everything that happens at night. The Mayor of the city is a 24-hour mayor. He’s on the job.”

Plusquellec is, however, the Nightlife Business Advocate for the City’s Office of Economic Development. “I’m an advocate and a nightlife management person.” He lists his responsibilities as talking to venues and the sector as a whole, figuring out their needs, and seeing what what the city can and can’t do to help them. “Not a mayor,” he repeats. “Just an advocate and manager.”

That “just” is a bit of an understatement these days. During the pandemic, music venues and gathering spots were some of the few to completely shutter. Restaurants were able to pivot, at significant effort and cost, to takeout or move to open air service. Shops did deliveries. Grocers were essential. But it was different for venues, both across the city and across the decades.

“You can’t compare an utter shutdown in an industry to other times,” Plusquellec says. “These folks didn’t make revenue for two plus years. Other times may have been hard or tighter. But they weren’t completely shut.” The result was two-fold. Venues faced permanent closure. Staff faced searching for something to pay the bills. And they found it.

“People in that industry for 20 or 30 years were completely cut off. They had to find different work. And what they found were daytime jobs that paid better and did not have the grueling schedule they had been working all that time.” Plusquellec sees a years-long project to replace qualified staff. Suddenly, workforce training has become a nightlife issue too. “It was a hard industry to get into, so now there is an opportunity.” 

Other projects include restarting programs to improve safety during the evening hours. They include robust security instruction, NARCAN distribution, and Don’t Stand By training designed to prevent sexual assaults before they happen. “I feel like we’re past the hair on fire keeping everyone afloat phase. Now we can start looking at getting back to normal and looking at programs that we were starting prior to the pandemic that got shut down.”

Life at night complementing nightlife

Coming to the other side of the pandemic, Plusquellec sees quite a few changes in Seattle’s night life. The standard events will continue. Bands will return. Nightclubs will be around where people can dance. But a worldwide trend is also starting to settle in town. “Younger folks want experiences and being in an activity and doing things collaboratively. Not so much going to bars and having drinks for the night. It’s why we’re seeing axe throwing.”

More broadly, there is a change in the overall perspective of the city outside of bankers’ hours. Plusquellic is steering his work towards a “life-at-night aspect” rather than just nightlife. Looking beyond bars and social events, he is considering the needs of anyone who works at the many jobs without a 9 to 5 schedule. 

“There are people working across 24 hours a day. Global tech, cleaners, longshoreman, cops, and Uber drivers. They need a city that functions at night as well because that’s when they’re doing their work. When they get done with their work, do we have offerings as well for their leisure. Or do we arbitrarily force them to go home?”

Looking at the whole aspect of the night time economy, Plusquellec is finding places where the needs of late night workers also also benefit entertainment venues. “One of the reasons the night mayor position sprouted up is that the 5 to 9 is just as important as the 9 to 5. Night time is an asset that needs to be nurtured and developed. People are not looking at it as just a nuisance to be tamped down and controlled. Cities are starting to recognize that it’s a huge economic asset.” 

Justifying even having a nightlife

Plusquellec has the right idea, and a comprehensive grasp on so many issues where nightlife overlaps and compliments life at night. But I can’t help thinking that there is something missing in the ways we’re all understanding this division.

One of the few studies that looked at governing the nighttime city (literally its title and the “oh really?” source that pointed out Seattle has someone like Plusquellec) identifies three roles taken on by nighttime advocates. They enhance the nocturnal “hardware”, developing the built environment conducive to vibrancy and quality of life. They also improve the nighttime “software” of regulations and laws dealing with everything from liquor to noise. Third, they “mediate and promote consensus among the wide variety of actors involved in nocturnal governance.”

The research emphasizes the liaison nature of the night mayor position. Across the three dozen cities the study found hosting such a role, the researchers considered it noteworthy that night mayors “promote mediation rather than regulation to solve urban issues after dark.”

There are so few things about the night time in that list that it could only have been written during the day. And that’s the problem. Night time advocacy isn’t even mostly about things happening at night. It’s starting from a place of begging not to shut down. Either please don’t shut down daytime services at an arbitrary time, or please don’t complain and shut down this cool bar.

Perhaps it’s the return of early sunsets and 14 hours of darkness, but treating life after dark in this city with liaising and mediating comes off as the bare minimum. While we can go full tilt into building a waterfront highway or drawing a new sports franchise, we’re missing similar energy towards building lively evenings or drawing overnight services. Even fostering nightlife around the waterfront or Climate Pledge Arena leaves a lot to be desired. To the point that it feels like scraps.

Instead, so much discussion seems like appeasing the folks who spend their days trying to ruin cool stuff. The same sensibility that relegates Seattle’s density to fronting highways and bans apartments from abutting open water also puts late night establishments on their back foot when dealing with the city. Seattle’s Nightlife Establishment Handbook dedicates an entire section to appeasing neighbors. Right between health requirements and a business plan. Nothing similar appears in the City’s regular small business handbook.

Besides the crater it’s crawling from, Seattle’s nightlife is coming out of the pandemic very similarly to how it went in. It’s interesting and hopeful, but curtailed by powers outside itself. Smart advocates like Scott Plusquellec are doing the hard work of identifying policy issues facing the city after dark, like the staffing shortage, the lack of food options for overnight nurses, and how awesome axe throwing can be. But moving from limited nightlife to a new level of life at night of may require a burlier push that goes beyond the appeasement of folks who would be just as happy without cool things going on after their bedtime.

And it’s still really difficult to find a good sandwich at midnight.

Prove us wrong: enter our “Sleepless in Seattle” nightlife photo contest.

The post Advocating for Seattle’s Nightlife, Post Pandemic first appeared on The Urbanist.

In the year since Climate Pledge Arena opened, I have been to the arena almost a dozen times for events large and small. It is a comfortable facility, and a very convenient bus ride from my house. I like the place a lot. The teams are pretty good too, with one tenant making the playoffs and the other… well… we’re happy to have hockey.

As such, I jumped at the chance when The Urbanist got invited to the media preview for the Arena’s new food and drink menu. It could have been hot dogs, frankly, and I would haven happily rolled on down. But they promised a new array of carefully curated cuisines that reflected a commitment to fresh and local. I was not disappointed. Next media day, I’m going to need an assistant because oof.

Tester Tested Testing Tests

Food at Climate Pledge Arena is managed by The Climate Collective, a collaboration between the Arena and food vendor Delaware North. Behind Executive Chef Molly DeMers, the group has auspicious goals that align with the climate conscious perspective of the arena. Sourcing 75% of the food within 300 miles of Seattle and reducing plastic are at the top of the list.

Billed as the “Next Wave of The Climate Collective” the tasting preview offered bites that were in the image of arena food, but taken a step further. DeMers said this was deliberate. “We’re stripping people’s perception of what arena food is.” Almost always, the tastes delivered.

We started at the grand opening of Molly D’s burgers, namesake of the chef and a replacement for the Lil’ Woody’s on the first floor. Serving grab-and-go smash burgers, the layout is familiar to anyone that did the hand-wavy thing at an Arena concession last year. Buzz in with a card or your registered mark of the devil, grab your food, and exit. The burgers themselves are solid artery cloggers, served single or double or with some pickles and greens as a “royal”.

The group of journalists, food bloggers, and me were welcomed onto the suite level and escorted to the north end Mount Baker Hall to see the rest of the food lineup. A long table at the entrance was laid out with samples for photographing. Featured were Sugo sushi, Dough Joy donuts, and both chicken and bananas foster wrapped in bubble waffles.

The tasting went EXTREMELY well, if a little overwhelming. The geniuses at Impossible Burgers introduced a bratwurst that it would make any carnivore rethink all their choices. Piled with onions and peppers, it hits all the right flavors and textures. The Arena’s pizzas have gone square, an interestingly useful choice for arena food that seems obvious when considered. The crusts are a bit heftier and stacked with salumi or seasonal vegetables. 

There was a streak of healthier food alternatives. The grain bowls topped with salmon and greens were tasty and satisfying. A new stand called Sugo provided hand rolls and poke. Both were heavy with well seasoned tuna on a respectably sized (not just filler) bed of rice. Unfortunately, Sugo is only available in the private suite clubs.

With some complaints coming about the price of beers, there were changes made to the Arena’s beverage program. First, the price of Miller Light through the arena will be reduced and there there will be locations selling a lower priced craft beer of the game. Second, the batch cocktails that are available on tap have been reformulated with juice from long time Seattle shop Scotty’s Juice. Not that they were trying to put thumbs on the judgment scales, but the tasting did have testers of the cocktails right at the front of the room. 

On the snack end, there were little bags of Goofyfoot pretzels. Covered in a key lime salt, the little treats are kind of stunning. The light pretzel gets a burst of sweet then a tang of citrus in each bite. It’s an opposite sensation of dipping fries in a Frosty. I debated whether I liked them and then – POOF – the whole bag disappeared. Also featured were bags of Seacharrones, very crunchy seaweed-based stand-ins for pork rinds of all things. They got the texture right and were eminently eatable and full of meaty umami. But without a coating of regret, they didn’t fully replicate the full drunken-late-night-gas-station-run sensation of their meat based counterparts.

One complaint, and this is my universal comment to burger and sandwich makers everywhere. Toast the rolls. Whether it’s for the sausage or the burgers or whatever, bread with crunchy edges is a) awesome and b) stands up to all the fixings that are being piled on. Grease soaked bread is also tasty, but it’s ~even better~ toasted. The only exception is a stand-alone hot dog cart who steams their buns. Every restaurant in the city should take note.

Hockey Night in Queen Anne

Of course, there’s a catch. How much of this new menu trickles into every corner of the Arena? There might be poke for the folks in the suites, but will the hoi polloi get cold pretzels and closed stands? 

That was really the disappointing thing that faced us when attending Seattle Storm games this summer. With the WNBA team playoff bound and Sue Bird’s announced retirement, the Storm averaged a league leading 10,000 fans each game. But the concessions didn’t reflect that, giving fans long lines at understaffed kiosks and most of the upper level simply closed.

So it feels only fair that a true assessment of the new menu’s success should come during a regular game, away from a media event or the pomp of opening night. And probably during the week. Helpfully, I had a ticket for just such a game. To be fair (to be fair) it was against the Vancouver Canucks, a division rival and a draw to our northern neighbors. But writing deadlines demand some compromise.

Under the pressures of a real event, the Arena’s new food program overall is good, but misses a couple of crucial points that would make it a full success.

Entering the arena, we made a direct trip to the Impossible Foods stand to appease the vegetarian in the group. The burger rated a solid thumbs up and the loaded fries were polished off with glee. They were lots of chili and fixings on tasty and well cooked curly fries. However, the Impossible bratwursts were not to be found, apparently replaced by a meatball sub.

Up in the 200s, we passed over the pizzas – which looked as square and robust as promised – and grabbed potatoes and soup. The salmon chowder kept the filler potatoes small and loaded on a couple solid pieces of actual fish. The broth was flavorful, and not the goopy mess offered by some chowder shops. Pop rocks potato was a miss. The spiral cut potato and Beecher’s cheese sauce were straight up great. But the mouth buzzing literal Pop Rocks were bacon flavored and summarily rejected by tasters as “uncomfortable and weird.”

A trip downstairs in the first intermission scored some mac and cheese and a couple steel cups of Pink Whitney Cooler cocktail. The mac and cheese was tested both with brisket and au natural. Both ranked unbelievably high, and the availability in two sizes was appreciated. At this point, we went with smalls. The reformulated cocktails are a solid improvement, with balanced flavors. The juice stands up to a considerable booziness. Last year’s cocktails bordered on astringent. This years’ have a pleasant tang without cauterizing on the way down, a change we’ll completely credit to Scotty’s Juice. 

Locations for promised cheap beer were mobbed, naturally. But that seemed more because it’s cheap(er) beer and not lack of staffing. Full credit to the arena for a hiring spree that put a good number of staff at every kiosk and stand. Everything was firing on all cylinders and it made for a humming concourse.

But that was it for our food testing. The third period was irritating for all the wrong reasons, but we stayed in our seats because there really wasn’t a ton more to draw us away. There’s candy boxes and popcorn bagged in locations around, but few spots to grab cookies. The cupcakes are locked in the suites. The lack of universal ice cream is a tragedy.

Shots on Goal

While this is technically a struggling post about food, you are reading The Urbanist, so we’re going to reserve space for transit. Which is exactly the opposite of many drivers on 1st Avenue, who decided the transit lane was their personal vehicles’ space. Until every bus lane is painted AND enforced, we will consider the Arena’s and the City’s transit plans to be expensive failures.

It’s not possible to make a similar clear-cut dismissal of The Climate Collective’s lofty goals about its food program. They hit many of those goals about quality and carry through for many people in the arena. 

Staffing appears strong, and we look forward to that sustaining through the hockey season and beyond. The food is a high quality, lapping what’s available at many other venues. And the menu is finding its niche, a surprising uniqueness on top of the quality. It’s not always the right direction (see bacon pop rocks) but it deserves a lot of credit for trying.

But the high promises and lofty goals don’t carry through to the little things. There’s a missing connection between some of the quirky treats and the majority of the shops around the building. Would have loved to pick up the Seacharrones at any of the stands, but they were not available. Desserts are hard to find. Let me reiterate: ice cream. Like the Kraken players fail to capitalize on rebounding pucks shot at the goal, the food program misses some really easy wins for a captive audience.

This Thursday night, the Kraken lost to the moribund Canucks by a score of 5-4. Of note, Vancouver had 18 shots on goal while Seattle had 36. Assaulting the net with double the pucks should result in a higher score. It did not. And the good guys gave up an empty net goal.

Can’t help but draw a similarity with the arena’s food. Chef DeMers and her staff are peppering the net with so many really interesting, fun, and amazing concepts. The work is there, the staff is now there, and many of the attempts land. But it will take just a step more to really capitalize on a spectacular effort.

We look forward to the same being true for the Kraken.

The post Climate Pledge Arena, Season 2: Better Food, Frostier Drinks, Lots of Goals first appeared on The Urbanist.

This week we learned that those signs will remain in place for several more months, as the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) announced that they have had to delay the construction of that connection. A two-way protected bike lane is planned along 1st Avenue and Broad Street connecting riders to and from 2nd Avenue’s bike lane. “The 1st Ave and Broad St Complete Street Extension project has been delayed due to unforeseen factors including material availability, weather, and crew availability. SDOT remains committed to completing this protected bike lane connection, and it is our hope to complete this project by spring 2022,” SDOT Media and Public Affairs Lead Ethan Bergerson confirmed.

“The southbound direction of the 1st Ave N protected bike lane south of Thomas St will remain closed until the 1st Ave and Broad St Complete Street Extension has been built in order to lead people to the temporary detour across Denny Way at 2nd Ave N, and avoid taking people to the 1st Ave and Denny Way intersection before the new bike signal and crossing have been completed,” Bergerson said. As of Friday, there wasn’t any detour signage along Thomas Street or 2nd Avenue N, two streets that don’t have any designated space for bikes.

Earlier this year, the connection to the south of Denny Way from 2nd Avenue was removed, with the bike lane now directing riders onto the sidewalk. The additional traffic lane that was created by removing the bike lane was another condition of the arena’s opening: the new parking garage attached to the arena exits via 2nd Avenue N. The fact that this lane was removed well before the replacement connection was even originally scheduled to start is fairly embelmatic of which street users are being prioritized in the area, to say nothing of the impact that routing people on bikes onto a sidewalk may have on other sidewalk users, including those with low vision who aren’t expecting that.

The planned 1st Avenue and Broad Street Connection will take the place of a parking lane along the west side of 1st Avenue and the north side of Broad Street. Work has already been completed to add bike signals, replace curb ramps, and install new signal poles, but the actual roadway changes won’t be able to be completed until spring.

Along with the bike lane, the improvements will come with a new crosswalk on the west side of the intersection of 1st Avenue and Denny Way, a spot where pedestrians currently are legally prohibited from crossing.

Close by, an improvement to create a direct bus connection from 3rd Avenue onto Denny Way is now in place, eliminating northbound buses from having to utilize the same route that this planned bike connection will now make. That change should save countless hours per year for all of the cumulative riders on those routes. People on bikes can also use the same dedicated signal that buses now use, if they are up for a short ride on harrowing Denny Way.

Ultimately, it’s hard to say the city is doing all it can to encourage people to find alternatives to driving to Climate Pledge Arena when the long-planned bike connection won’t be in place until the facility has been open for half a year or so. But delays happen of course, and while the city won’t have completed all of the ambitious list of bike projects thay had intended to in 2021, these needed improvements will happen.

The post Climate Pledge Arena’s Full Bike Connection Delayed to Next Spring first appeared on The Urbanist.

Nearly all improvements were agreed to as a condition of the new arena receiving its Master Use Permit (MUP), and were prioritized via the Seattle Department of Transportation’s outreach process around north downtown mobility. That process led to the 2019 NODO [North Downtown] Mobility Action Plan, which will also be used to determine other transportation improvements that might be needed in the surrounding neighborhoods after the arena is open.

Transit Improvements

The Kraken generated headlines last year when they announced that all home hockey game attendees would receive a free regional transit pass with their tickets. Perhaps even more so than the cost benefit to hockey fans is the ease with which the transit pass will be available, embedded in the digital ticket. Attendees are also encouraged to purchase their parking at any of the arena’s three garages at the time they buy a ticket — with people who might have opted for street parking being dissuaded by special on-street parking rates intended to push people into garages. Basically, people are being pushed to think about their mode of transportation up front when they plan their trip.

Of course, for transit to be competitive, it has to work well. Big events at Seattle Center’s arena have always had significant impacts on buses traveling through the corridor, impacting riders heading to Queen Anne, Ballard, Magnolia, and beyond. But Climate Pledge Arena will open with new transit lanes for northbound buses along 1st Ave N and for southbound buses along Queen Anne Ave N.

The transit-only lanes won’t extend the entirety of each street, with buses needing to merge a block before either Mercer Street or Denny Way respectively in order to make turns onto those streets. The transit-only lane on 1st Ave N will also come with a queue jump that will give buses a head start at Republican Street.

According to the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), these transit lanes, combined with other strategies that are being implemented to manage transportation at the arena, will nearly cut in half the travel time on transit for southbound buses using Queen Anne Ave N, going from 11.8 minutes to 6.3 minutes in post-event traffic between Mercer Street and Denny Way. Travel time for northbound buses will improve by one minute, from 6.8 minutes to 5.8 minutes under the same conditions between Denny Way and Mercer Street.

A big part of ensuring success for these transit lanes will be making sure they remain clear for buses. 1st Ave N in particular will be an obvious spot for Uber and Lyft drivers to queue around events, but geofencing is planned to restrict where on-call drivers can pick up and drop off riders, away from transit priority corridors. It remains to be seen how this will actually work in practice.

Also taking shape right now is a direct northbound connection between the 3rd Avenue bus corridor and Denny Way. Buses heading to Uptown or Magnolia have always had to take a turn from 3rd Avenue onto Broad Street and then onto 1st Avenue to keep going north, but the added transit lane and new traffic signal will allow buses to turn directly from 3rd Avenue onto Denny Way, saving Metro dozens of hours per year and saving riders’ time.

As for Denny Way itself, prioritization won’t be as clear cut for riders of the Route 8 heading to Capitol Hill from Uptown. SDOT is investing around $10 million in supercharging traffic signals along the corridor, making them adaptive like the ones currently in place along Mercer Street. While those improvements might come at the expense of people walking as far away as Stewart Street, there may be small gains for the Route 8. After events, drivers exiting from many garages in the vicinity will be directed to corridors that aren’t Denny Way, for example turning left from 5th Ave N onto Denny will be prohibited in an attempt to keep Denny Way from becoming a parking lot. Still, SDOT’s data only suggests that traffic speeds on Denny between Taylor and Stewart will only go from 2 mph to 2.7 mph with these mitigation strategies.

Bike Network Improvements

Work is currently underway to extend the 2nd Avenue protected bike lane into Uptown. The current northern terminus of that bike lane at Denny Way will be adjusted, routing people on bikes onto the sidewalk area so that two southbound lanes of 2nd Avenue can cross Denny Way at a time. Instead, the extension of the two-way protected bike lane will be installed along Broad Street and 1st Avenue.

At Denny Way, a new pedestrian and bicycle crossing will be added along the west side of the intersection, where a signalized crossing currently doesn’t exist and signs prohibit crossing now. From there the bike lane will run along 1st Ave N’s west side for two blocks to Thomas Street, kitty-corner from the arena, but on Thomas Street it takes a jog over one block to Queen Anne Ave N.

No bike facilities will connect the block between Mercer and Roy Street in Uptown’s north end, even though Roy Street is one of the only streets heading east-west outside of Seattle Center that has bike lanes.

Big upgrades are also taking shape to the connection to the Elliott Bay Trail via the John Coney bridge at Harrison Street and 3rd Ave W. Once complete, the street will have a two-way protected bike lane for the half block between the bridge and Harrison Street. New sidewalks have replaced the damaged old ones for people who don’t feel comfortable in a bike lane.

East-west improvements in Uptown are already in place along Harrison Street connecting to the Queen Anne Ave N protected bike lanes, but just in the uphill direction. Downhill the traffic lane has been narrowed, with no parking along that side of the street, with new all-way stop signs hopefully reducing vehicle speeds along the corridor.

On the east side of Seattle Center, people riding bikes from Dexter Ave N or 9th Ave N might not have noticed new protected bike lanes that went in last year along Thomas Street around the time that the Washington State Department of Transportation was wrapping up work on the massive-for-a-city-street 7th Ave N. Some gaps remain along Thomas, as the corridor was slated to get further upgrades as part of the “Thomas Street Redefined” project. That project actually involved a planned closure of Thomas Street to vehicle traffic immediately east of Seattle Center at 5th Ave N in early 2020 but that never happened, with a new timeline unclear.

Among other upgrades, Thomas Street Redefined includes the installation of Seattle’s first protected intersection at Dexter Ave N, a design implemented in many other cities in which all directions of bike and pedestrian traffic are protected from turning vehicles by physical barriers through most of the intersection. The plans for that are currently at the 30% design level and are shown below.

The expectation of Seattle’s transportation planners is that on the day of the arena’s opening 63% of the attendees will arrive by their own private vehicle, with another 15% arriving by ridehail. Transit is only expected to be used by 8% of attendees arriving and 6% of attendees departing events, a number that SDOT hopes to close to double as soon as possible and more than triple by 2035. Bike mode share is expected at a mere 1% with a stretch goal of…2%.

Of course, the improvements to the streetscape help all Seattleites trying to navigate Uptown or who need to get through the neighborhood on the way to somewhere else. In this way, the arena’s impact should reverberate in some positive ways, no matter how you may feel about the facility itself or its reflection on Amazon’s Climate Pledge.

The post Uptown Streetscape Changes Come Together In Advance of Arena’s Reopening first appeared on The Urbanist.

The opening of the new arena will coincide with the launch of the next iteration of Seattle’s regional fare technology, ORCA Next Generation, and NHL Seattle intends to integrate its free transit pass system into that program. Thus, a hockey game ticket will double as a transit fare. The Seattle Center Arena will be an all-digital venue with event attendees almost exclusively using tickets on their phones, NHL Seattle’s VP of Transportation Rob Johnson told a group of reporters at a press preview last week.

The free transit program is modeled on similar programs currently in place at both the Golden State Warriors’ Chase Center in San Francisco and the Phoenix Suns’ Talking Stick Resort Arena. In those cities, your event ticket to either a sports game or a concert is your ticket to use transit as well. But it’s not yet known how big the window for free transit around a game will be, whether an all-day pass or just for a few hours on either side of the game.

The employees at the Talking Stick Resort Arena in Phoenix have their transit to and from work paid for as well, but NHL Seattle said it wasn’t ready to announce if that will be the case at the Seattle venue. Attendees of concerts at the arena are also not covered under this policy yet. The Seattle Storm has partnered with Sound Transit to offer fans pre-loaded ORCA cards to select games in the past, but has not yet signed on to providing free transit to all attendees.

The Seattle Center Arena environmental impact statement projected that around 60% of event attendees will travel by private vehicle, with another 15% taking Uber or Lyft. Less than 10% of attendees were assumed to arrive via bus. Hopefully free transit to hockey games can increase those numbers.

Attendees at arena events will be able to purchase their reserved parking spot at a Seattle Center lot at the time of ticket purchase, but it’s not yet known if they will have to choose parking or transit at the same time.

Data from the first round of NHL Seattle season ticket purchase suggests that around half of attendees live within an hour of the arena by transit, with that number going up to over 60% by 2024.

Monorail Investments

NHL Seattle, along with Seattle Monorail Services, is also announcing today that the first phase of improvements to the Seattle Monorail will be moving forward, with a focus on making Westlake Station able to handle much higher volumes of passengers to accommodate post-event crowds at the new arena.

Changes at Westlake Station in the 1980s continue to limit the ability of the monorail to fulfill the full people-moving capacity it was designed for. Modifying Westlake Station to accommodate exit and entry from all doors on the trains will allow crowds to exit at Westlake more quickly, making the trains able to accomplish more 90-second runs after events.

The other big change for the monorail will be a move from ticket windows and lines to fare gates and ticket kiosks. But Seattle Monorail Services is not sure if they will be installing glass partitions between trains and the platform, as depicted in their renderings.

Westlake Station will also be adding a second elevator, as well as switching the escalators at Westlake Mall to run in the down direction only after events, to better facilitate transfers between the Seattle Monorail and Link light rail below street level.

The fact that Seattle Center’s monorail station is able to handle loading and unloading on all sides of two trains at the platform means that it’s able to handle huge crowds, but improvements there will also make it easier to access the trains.

Broader Arena Transportation Plans

These two announcements today are what NHL Seattle is calling its first phase of transportation plans, but The Urbanist has been covering a number of other transportation projects that are moving forward as the new arena heads toward its 2021 opening. There are changes to Seattle’s bike network, some good and some not-so-good. There is the beefing up of traffic signals on Denny Way to flush cars out of the neighborhood. And then there’s the parking.

Key Arena’s renovation continues to be a focal point in Seattle’s transportation conversation and we don’t expect that to change any time soon.

The post NHL Seattle Will Fund Free Transit for Home Game Attendees first appeared on The Urbanist.

Queen Anne Avenue N and 1st Avenue N north of Denny Way operate as a couplet for vehicle traffic, with Queen Anne Ave carrying the southbound traffic and 1st Ave N carrying northbound. Currently the only bike infrastructure on Queen Anne Ave is a faded paint bike lane next to curbside parking. On 1st Avenue N a paint bike lane also ran along side Key Arena, prior to the start of construction on the arena itself. In order to protect bike riders from dozens of construction vehicles per hour, last year the 1st Avenue bike lane was upgraded to a protected lane for the duration of construction: that lane runs today from Denny all the way to Roy Street to the delight of Uptown bike riders.

However, once construction is complete and the arena opens, people wishing to bike from one end of the neighborhood to the other will have to make a jog at Thomas Street, with a two-way cycletrack planned north of Thomas on Queen Anne Ave N and south of Thomas on 1st Avenue N. The connection on Thomas will mostly include physical protection from the traffic lane, but a short segment will not.

Bike riders are being moved off 1st Avenue N to make way for what SDOT is calling a “flex lane”–a curbside parking lane that can be put into service as a travel lane if necessary. With a planned bus-only lane on 1st Ave N terminating at Republican Street (with a transit queue jump) that preserves three general purpose travel lanes north of Republican for traffic after events to get onto Mercer Street and out of the area.

1st Avenue N is currently a successful demonstration of how well a protected bike lane works on that street, and the dedicated bus lane will maintain transit capacity after events. Moving the bike lane off 1st Avenue N to add back car capacity doesn’t make sense. People of all ages and abilities can ride safely and feel comfortable in protected bike lanes. This opens up biking to a lot more people and convinces people to bike more often. But a protected bike lane need to connect to other safe biking facilities to create a highly useful network. If there’s a gap, some people will simply choose not to bike, and unfortunately SDOT is planning to create some gaps.

A document obtained from SDOT via public records request shows how the need for travel lanes guided the location of the bike facility, with red arrows on the map designating the number of general purpose travel lanes:

Connection to the North

Roy Street currently features bike lanes stretching almost all the way from 5th Avenue to Queen Anne Avenue–the only east-west dedicated bike lane north of Denny Way. These bike lanes could use an upgrade (as a recently rejected Neighborhood Street Fund proposal would have done) but they are better than nothing. However, the bike lane planned for Queen Anne Avenue N would end a block short of Roy, not extending north of Mercer Street except in the form of a stub bike lane directing people on bikes around the line of parked cars into the traffic lane.

Getting into the two-way bike lane to head south will also be a challenge. People on bikes in mixed-traffic coming south on Queen Anne will need to get all the way over to the left to enter the protected bike lane, navigating buses entering the bus lane and drivers getting out of the bus lane.

Reached for comment about the one-block gap, SDOT’s Ethan Bergerson told The Urbanist: “We do not yet have funding identified for this connection. Going forward, we will continue to work to identify potential funding sources to complete a two-way protected bike lane on Queen Anne Ave N between Roy St and Mercer St.”

But the funding for bike lanes through the end of the Move Seattle levy has already been allocated to other projects, and the need to fund a one-block gap was not known at the time those projects were decided. The city council has already worked hard to find additional funds to build connections in Southeast Seattle.

Connection to the South

What about connections to the south of Uptown from these new bike lanes? The 2nd Avenue protected bike lane’s northern segment is getting deleted to accommodate more car traffic from arena garages, with bike riders directed to the sidewalk and no plans for a bicycle connection on 2nd Avenue N, so cross that off the list.

The bicycle master plan has funded a route that would utilize Broad Street and 1st Avenue to connect the planned lane on 1st Ave N to 2nd Avenue south of Broad St. But we don’t know what that looks like yet. In December, the bike advisory board was told that design for that segment was still in very early stages with essentially no information to share about how that route would connect. It is not known if the facility would be a two-way cycletrack or one-way bike lanes on either side of the street. What is known is that as planned the route would be another zigzag for people coming and going from Uptown in addition to the one happening at Thomas Street.

The bicycle master plan’s implementation plan through 2024, updated this past spring after much community process, showed facilities on both Queen Anne Ave and 1st Ave N all the way from Denny Way to Roy Street. When the update was released, Deputy Mayor Shefali Ranganathan told the bike board what the direction from the Mayor’s office was on the bike master plan: connecting hubs given the constrained resources and completing existing networks.

The planned facility here fails that test on both counts, by dead ending at Mercer Street, a street not designed for anyone to bike on. The planned zigzags in the route to accommodate car traffic water down the project even more. It is not what the community was promised earlier this year, by a long shot.

The arena’s goals for bike mode share to events is set at a shameful 2%, and the concessions made here clearly illustrate why. The short-sighted decisions here to accommodate vehicles will likely end up pleasing no one, and squandering an opportunity for a people-focused multi-purpose arena built for all Seattle residents, not just those in cars.

The post Arena’s Protected Bike Lane Component Features a Zigzag and a Dead End first appeared on The Urbanist.

With explosive growth of Uptown and the renovation of KeyArena on the horizon, monorail’s use as a primary means of public transportation is increasingly important. In 2017, the Seattle Department of Transportation began the process of evaluating ORCA integration, which will allow riders to use ORCA as fare media instead of requiring purchase special monorail tickets or passes. ORCA cardholders will be able to use their e-purse, PugetPass, or a mix thereof to pay for monorail rides The new system could be in place by next spring.

Now officials at the Seattle Monorail are seeking wider ranging feedback on how to improve access, service, and aesthetics. “We want to know more about how people use the monorail today, how they think they might use the monorail in the future,” Megan Chang said, general manager of Seattle Monorail Services. “And what people think about potential changes to the existing stations and how that affects the perceived convenience of the system.”

By 2020, KeyArena could have a new National Hockey League team playing at the venue in addition to more concerts and National Basketball Association team. A recent rezone of Uptown will also increase jobs and housing substantially in the coming years and Seattle Center is actively working on a new master plan, which further fuel the need for transportation access. Light rail won’t arrive at Seattle Center until 2035, so that makes improvements to the monorail and other bus service in the area very valuable investments now.

The monorail raises questions in several key areas:

• How often respondents ride the monorail and why they make their trips;
• How respondents typically get to Seattle Center;
• How often respondents would go to Seattle Center once the arena renovation is complete; and
• What attractions at the arena that might draw respondents in.

Click to view slideshow.

The survey also asks respondents what they think of conceptual station improvements at Westlake and Seattle Center. These include better connections to light like new stairs, elevators, and escalators, improved connections to street level, and enhanced accessible. As a way to improve service, the Seattle Monorail is kicking around could higher frequencies. One helpful thing not listed though is publicly available transit data for more apps, which could help transit riders know that the monorail is a real option and not just an attraction or oddity.

The survey is open to public comment through April 1st.

Mayor Calls For Seattle Monorail ORCA Integration

The post How Would You Design A Better Seattle Monorail? first appeared on The Urbanist.