1w ago

This place is called Pike Place Market, Seattle. Last year, some people claimed no one will shop here anymore if it's pedestrianized.

This summer, for the first time, Seattle banned cars in the Pike Place Market :

https://www.knkx.org/transportation/2025-05-08/seattle-pike-place-market-tests-car-ban-pilot-downtown-overlook-walk-flowers-vendors

Last year (2024), some politicians said no one will shop here anymore if it's pedestrianized :

https://publicola.com/2024/04/02/dont-open-pike-place-to-pedestrians-council-member-urges/

52 comments

Some shades or trees will improve this place even more.

Lol wtf. I've lived in Seattle most of my life now, and have known Pike Place Market since I first moved here in the early 90s. And that strip of road down there NEVER should have been a road. Seattle needs to just mark it off and have it be foot traffic only.
That also being said, there's something to it though, being crammed on the sidewalk in the pouring rain, alongside a million other people on this tiny little sidewalk, around all the various hidden and famous shops and importers.
I don't think anybody actually thought closing the road from car traffic would negatively affect the market. You'd have to be a vitriolic idiot to actually believe that. That's like saying having a bus service Disneyland would make people less likely to go. It just doesn't make sense.
- Yeah, I live in Seattle and have been to Pike Place many a time. Having cars down there was fucking deranged. Neither the pedestrians nor the drivers could possibly have been happy about the situation.
  
  It was like 70% tourists who were routed that way by Google maps. The terror on a Midwestern Grandma's face as she tried to navigate the road while pedestrians push within inches of her rental cars bumper was priceless.
- there’s something to it though, being crammed on the sidewalk in the pouring rain, alongside a million other people on this tiny little sidewalk, around all the various hidden and famous shops and importers.
  Yeah for me this was the feeling of "fuck seattle" and "i'm never coming back here." But now it's looking much better.

There's a street in my city with many major shops. Big clothing chains and such. A couple of years ago it was suggested to make it a pedestrian zone and the ones crying the loudest were the shop owners. Noone will buy anything if they can't stop their car directly in front of the shop! And all the old people with multiple hip surgeries, who CAN'T come if the taxi can't let them out right in front of the shop and who are the main customer base!!!
Well, anyway, it's been a pedestrian zone for two years now and I've never seen so many people in the shops before. You can't find a place to sit in the restaurants and cafés now on saturdays when before they were half full at best. Funnily enough after all the headlines and screaming on facebook about how the pedestrian zone will KILL all business, it's become pretty quiet. You won't read news headlines about the success of the pedestrian zone.

Looks like a fucking european street

So many parking spaces wasted! Now small businesses will suffer 😢

I didn't see any changes over Pride weekend 6/29. Cars still turn off of first onto Pike. I wasn't in this lower / outer corner of the market though. 🤷‍♂️

No ones shopping, there are all walking about having a good time /s

Has the thought occurred that these people might not be shopping but commuting? Forced to commute on foot like some medieval peasant? You're ideology is showing
- Sure, commuting through a 3 block market. Totally a thing in reality.
  
  If I could commute to work by walking through pike place market every day I would!
- Sure if you're commuting you should have no issue commuting exactly one block over from the market.
  I've been there in person, even before closing from vehicles, there wasn't an issue with congestion.
  People walked to the market from the public parking a block away then as well.

TBF, I don't see a single shopping bag or anything purchased in the entire photo.
- It's not really a place for shipping.

Wait, people think that people want to drive in Seattle? Lol fuck that shit. Worst road layouts I've ever seen, terrible traffic, and a good light rail and bus system.
- I tried to drive in Seattle one time about 15 years ago. As far as I can tell, the lane markers and other road paint in Seattle must be designed to become completely invisible as soon as the road gets wet. And it's wet a lot.
  
  Driving in Seattle is basically commuting on nightmare difficulty.
  Iron man mode, permadeath, of course, lol
  https://youtube.com/watch?v=C56ZLKceTPI
  The I5 Union Street exit is basically a literal meme for how often people not from Seattle eat shit trying to take it too fast, or when its wet (which is often).
  Doesn't help that the signs and lanes are confusing as fuck, and also no one will ever let you merge.
  
  I think its a PNW thing. Portland area is like that as well.
- So ... short version of history:
  Seattle was not originally 'Seattle'.
  It was a bunch of different smaller towns, all nearby each other, that grew outward toward each other.
  As a result, there were many differently oriented street grid layouts... that roughly all smashed into each other at downtown/pioneer square.
  The... the meeting where multiple proponents of different street grids, basically mayors of the smaller but now merging towns... where they were supposed to agree on how to make a unified system?
  Literally devolved into a a brawl, a melee.
  ... That's why Seattle's street layout fundamentally makes no sense.
  That and the pretty extreme terrain. Try walking all the way up Pike or Pine, from Pike Place Market, all the way up to Capitol Hill.
  Steep grades, lots of hills.
  Check out the Seattle Underground tour if you want a more comprehensive explanation of this batshittery, lol.
  
  Ok that explains some of it but also no seriously Jesus fucking shit its hell to drive. I've heard amazing things about the tour.
  But yeah I really don't buy that grade is that big of an issue when it's a few blocks from the Westlake station. The city is absolutely hilly as hell and that can be exhausting, but anything close to the rail line isn't that bad. If it were next to the space needle I'd agree though.
  
  Yeah I remember my underground tour guide referring to one particular area known as Profanity Hill due to how hard it was to climb it on foot. The city's an amazing place to walk around despite the shitty street layouts.
- The only people that use to drive through there were tourists that put the location in their GPS and then got stuck.
  Them and delivery/Uber drivers.
  Ugh. The amount of Uber drivers that actually dropped people off in the middle of Pike Plac was infuriating.

oh my god they pedestrianized Pike Place?? that'll make it a thousand times nicer, i hope they don't gentrify-out that really good random dim sum street food place with the huge bao
- They definitely won't, the prices will just go up to match the rents. Last time I was there the line was insanely long, raising prices certainly wouldn't deter the majority of their customers.
  
  The market is owned by the city and managed by the market council, public ownership keeps the rent low for the small businesses that operate there!

So the argument was "if we make it walkable, people will stop coming here"?
- Yep, that is indeed what it boils down to because it's a major tourist attraction for people coming in to visit Seattle. So the city councilperson argued that it would reduce people visiting if they had to park far away.
  Glad to see they were wrong.
  
  I’ve been to Seattle twice and we went to the market both times. We always walked from our hotel bc there’s quite a few hotels in that area (almost like it’s a hot tourist area) but even when we wanted to go somewhere further away, we just either used public transit or those rentable scooter things. Also the first time we went to pike place market like 4 years ago or something cars kept trying to drive around the crowd and it made everything so much worse. I swear some people have forgotten that not using a car is an option, even when they only want to go somewhere a block away
- The absolutely baffling thing is that that one particular stretch of road has been being shut down to car traffic for various events for like... decades.
  Its very widely a social faux pas to drive on that street during busy market hours, becsause it has always been full of pedestrians without it even being blocked off, again, for decades.
  They'll regularly have overflow marker stalls, or just functionally limit it to market stall shopkeeps unloading or packing up their stuff.
  The only people who would be against this like 1/8 of a mile of road that is nearly always swarming with people just finally being formally classed as 'no cars' are fucking idiots and/or obscenely privileged suburbanites who cannot understand the concept of walking.
  There is literally a (or multiple) parking garage(s) under the Market. You can park in it, and emerge just literally in the Market.
  https://www.pikeplacemarket.org/parking-directions/
  Its just that it doesn't work so well for modern, literally larger than a WW2 M4 Sherman tank, automobiles.
  If you wanna zip around Seattle and actually be able to park, get a subcompact.
  It can be done, I've done it, for a decade.
  Your F-350 is shit outta luck though.

The cars there were always a joke. It was always some poor sucker of a tourist who didn't know what it was and would take half an hour to go three blocks dodging all the tourists.
- Yes, even if you could legally drive in Pike's Place, for all intents and purposes, you might as well say that you couldn't drive there before. Those politicians who said nobody would shop there were either lying through their teeth or completely uninformed.

A lot of traffic came from people passing through in their cars just because Google Maps said so. It's stupid to clog up a social area in most cities.

It really needs more trees, dang.
- At least now it's a possibility.

Notice how they made it walkable and now there’s nobody there. /s

oh nice, they pedestrianized pike place market? that place is famous, there's textbooks in asia that tell about it, part of the colonial cultural education bullshit that comes with compulsory English education. learn all about a bunch of American cities

And look, nobody in the shops, everybody's just walking there! /s (It do need more trees tho.)

Banning all non-delivery and non-emergency vehicles should have been done many years ago in the most visited attraction in the Pacific Northwest. But I'm glad to see Seattle as one of the leading US cities in urban planning.
- This plus the light rail build out has made living here without a car so much more pleasant. If only the rail went all the way up to Everett...

fucking finally. Pike Market has always been too crowded for cars anyway

Carbrains have one refrain: economic harm. As if driving any distance longer than a football field is more convenient than a walkable/bikeable city with good public transit for longer hauls.

Oh fuck I didn’t hear about this! Now I actually want to go back to Pike Place Market. I haven’t been in ages because of the fucking cars

Nice to hear, I visited a while back and barely even remember cars because it seems so impractical for that area. It's already so very walkable, high density shopping area (with lovely food).

So glad they did this. I made a wrong turn once when I first moved here and drove down the road accidentally. Blocking it off just helps everyone.

Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Where will all the cars park? Won't anybody think of the poor cars?

Personally I'm against pedestrianization of Pike Place. It's a literal tourist trap. Ever clueless car that finds itself in that hell warms my heart.
Let the cars in, make them suffer.
- Awww c'mon, you don't wanna torture motorists? Y'all don't have a sense of whimsey and bloodlust.

52 comments