Remember “You Draw It” from the Sunday funnies? Well, now you can have that kind of fun again with Move Levy plans! Below are 2 pictures of the intersection of 50th, Stone Way, and Green Lake Way- one showing the way it works today, then a second with Cycle Tracks ready for you to design. You get to design 5 turning movements working in concert for cars and bikes:
Below is the You Draw It version with cycle track entry points added. You can change any of the roadways, but they must connect to existing roadway lines at the limits of the picture. Cycle Tracks must connect to bike lanes on Stone since that’s where most people go. Throttling the intersection by adding a 6th signal just for bikes is considered cheating and will disqualify the answer. Use Copenhagen Turns, bike boxes, change the order of signals, put in a roundabout, add a draw bridge, Have Fun!
Here is a printable PDF version for you to play with. Print out it out, design the roadway the way you want, then scan and send your solution into Wallyhood at [email protected]. If we get a few good replies, we’ll post them!
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This is one of the worst intersections in Seattle. I feel like I spent much of my adult life at reds there.
I’d like to see the stone tablet declaring that Green Lake Way needs to exist between 46th and 50th. It totally breaks the street-grid, which directly leads to the mess at 50th.
Removing that road (which has no driveways that face onto it, as far as I can tell), would end the nightmarish intersections both at 50th & 46th, both of which stink because they’re high-volume 5-way intersections.
The road-space on Greenlake Way (0.3 miles x 58′ wide, excluding sidewalks) could be re-used in an interesting manner (Long linear park? 2.1-acre urban farm? Series of tennis/basketball courts? Mini-putt?)
The intersection needs to be made into a large traffic circle with no lights. The bike lanes just made traffic worse and are underutilized already.
Until the city marks the other crossroads along Greenlake so they are safe, I’ll vote against anything to speed traffic up on that road. People are already doing 50 mph on their way from Ballard and Queen Anne to I-5. No one stops for pedestrians. The SPD doesn’t give out tickets, and I’m going to start sending the city videos so I can sue when someone gets killed due to their negligence. There has to be $189 tickets involved to get the city to do its job.
@3 “The bike lanes just made traffic worse and are underutilized already.”
While I have no before/after data specfically for Greenlake, I will note that in other places, bike-lanes are useful even if 0 people ride their bikes in them.
In Long Beach, CA, when protected bike-lanes were implemented in 2013, it prompted a 33% increase in biking & 13% increase in walking. Bike/car collisions went from 5 in a year to 1, though that’s not statistically meaningful. What *is* statistically meaningful is that car/car crashes went from 80 before to 45 after.
So, the extra buffer-zone that bike lanes provide are an advantage for drivers (who wants to get hit?), even if nobody ever puts a single skinny wheel in them.
http://www.bikelongbeach.org/archives/5534