This past week Seattle Department of Transportation announced a final decision on implementation of a lane configuration change on 24th Avenue Northwest, and has decided to continue the single travel lane-center turn lane-single travel lane design already in place north of Northwest 65th. I am in support of this change, mostly for the sake of pedestrian safety, but also because I believe there will be smoother, less aggressive, and ultimately safer traffic flow with the new configuration.

I was quoted in this paper in support of the "road diet" and I believe that we in Ballard will look back at this decision and ask ourselves, "Why didn't we do this earlier?" Many people had concerns about the impact on traffic flow, on bus service, and what effect growth in Ballard might have on the changes. I believe Seattle Department of Transportation needs to be congratulated, on the one hand, for making a good case for this logical and sensible change, and on the other hand needs to hear from us about how to effectively implement the roadway change and evaluate its impact.

I hope you will join me in asking Seattle Department of Transportation to:

1) Ensure that the current bus pullout zones in the curb lane for the four Metro stops between Northwest 57th and Northwest 65th remain. This allows buses to pull out of the traffic lane to pick up passengers. It would be unwise to take away those pullouts and force buses to obstruct traffic every time they pick up passengers during the busy morning commute times.

2) Make sure this road diet implementation is one that is monitored, evaluated, and modified as needed, to accommodate the increasing population density in Ballard and business growth northward along 24th Northwest. Because no systematic evaluation of the short or long term impact of changes such as this are being carried out across the city, it has been suggested that the city start doing so. Let's bring the logic of science and measurement to bear on some of our traffic engineering tools, and make Ballard's new road diet a case study for ongoing evaluation of motor vehicle, pedestrian, bicycle, and transit traffic, a type of 'before and after' analysis, with increasing density in the mix as one of the variables.

3) Create an interesting and artful crosswalk, when the current crosswalk at the old Ballard library is redone. Sure, bright white stripes are nice, but how about some treatment of the pavement and the streetscape that are traffic calming, and soothing, alerting drivers that they are entering a quieter, slower, more pedestrian oriented zone? Perhaps a midblock crossing is more appropriate, or some different, human scaled lighting? We can do better than simple restriping to create another crosswalk. Let's put our creative hats on to make a crosswalk that is scaled for and reflects current and future conditions.

I'll be sending these comments to Seattle Department of Transportation as well and encourage others to make their views known. This is a great opportunity to increase the walkability and scale of our neighborhood - let's try to get it right.

Kevin Carrabine

Sunset Hill