There’s a piece of the heated discussion over the traffic changes on Roosevelt Way Northeast that doesn’t have to do with bike lanes, or the extra volume now that 15th Avenue Northeast is closed for the year.
Time and time again, people have complained on Maple Leaf Life, or on the Maple Leaf Community Council’s issue reporting map, that they can no longer see to turn left or right onto Roosevelt from many side streets.
In part this is because of the extra traffic. In part, though, this is because vehicles are parking so close to intersections that it’s impossible to see around them to look for oncoming traffic. This is particularly true when fat SUVs park close to a corner.
The photo above is the driver’s view at the intersection of Roosevelt and Northeast 88th Street (across from Cloud City Coffee). It’s difficult enough enough to turn right (north) there. It’s become almost impossible, for much of the day, to make a safe left turn here.
The city has addressed this at some intersections, for example, at Roosevelt and Northeast 94th Street, where Cheryl originally complained on the issue reporting map:
Line-of-sight vision for turning onto Roosevelt is very often blocked by large vehicles (usually commercial trucks) parked in front of the Cabinetworks business at the southeast corner of this intersection. It makes for a dangerous situation of needing to pull out onto a busy arterial without accurately assessing the traffic conditions.
She later said the city partially resolved the issue by moving parking five feet further down the street, but still plans to carry a camera in her car to document problems.
What other intersections have trouble with close-parked cars blocking sight lines?
How about putting up a “No Parking South of Here” sign where the SUV is parked at the northeast corner of 88th/Roosevelt.
I go around the block, down 99th. Turn north to go south on Roosevelt. It’s too scary otherwise. Another thing since the bridge has been closed, I hear a lot more horn honking. Better than having car accidents there.
I disagree a bit on this last point: urban coping mechanisms are obviously important for all Seattleites to have as density increases in the years to come. Even so, I think we *can* achieve all those traffic goals while being a part of a big city. Our problem is not unreasonable expectations for road infrastructure; our problem is that the city doesn’t really pay Maple Leaf that much attention and/or gives short shrift to issues and IDEAS coming out of Maple Leaf (not just traffic-wise: the city even ignored the top requests for the Maple Leaf Reservoir Park plan.)
It’s very hard to get the attention of higher-ups at SDOT and other departments, let alone city council members or the mayor, since we are “only” a middle-class neighborhood with minimal political clout. Culturally our neighborhood also kind tends not to raise a stink about things other neighborhoods would raise pitchforks and torches about (e.g. the eyesore empty lot at the former Cafe News).
When Maple Leaf as a community does things that annoy people who don’t live or work or go to school in Maple Leaf, it also often seems like the city is more responsive to the non-Maple Leafers’ issues than to ours (e.g. a proper crosswalk at Perkins is less important than impeding people driving through the neighborhood on Roosevelt, or e.g. the traffic light at LCW and 98th that increases traffic volume in north ML dramatically was put in at the time without any input from Maple Leafers).
Anyway, if you drive through wealthier areas of town like parts of Ballard, Queen Anne, Magnolia, Leschi, Capitol Hill, Madison Park, you find the city has gone to great lengths to lower traffic volumes, add bike lanes and sidewalks, provide parking options, and reduce cut-through traffic and traffic speeds. In my copious free time I can’t provide documentation of this, but I suspect actual data would also support this perception.
This issue rapidly devolves into everyone’s personal favorite irritation, whether it is “fat SUVs” or “poor designs approved by the DPD”, or my personal favorite, people parking illegally close to corners. Ticket them!
But whatever your pet peeve,, in the end the fact remains Maple Leaf is part of a big city and that does require drivers to develop driving (and in some cases, coping) skills for the situations they encounter. It is part of the driving environment in the city. The street engineering Seattle can only be improved so much and you just can’t have it all (multiple cars per household + convenient parking + bicycle lanes + low traffic volumes + lack of traffic problems).
The parking/line of sight problem predates all the townhouses by many years, actually. It’s never been that safe to turn onto Roosevelt or 5th from side streets. I personally think the problem relates to *every* single intersection on both those arterials through Maple Leaf; it is not a problem at just one or two intersections.
Also, people with 1940s-era houses can’t park in their garages, either, unless they’re driving Smartcars or something . . .
This is the side effect of poor townhome designs approved by DPD. People can’t park in the garages so it adds to street parking.
97th and Roosevelt on the eastside. It is dangerous to take a left there because the parked cars block the line of sight.
I go down to 100th to take a left onto Roosevelt Way.