Lake Washington Blvd

The Seattle Department of Transportation, in partnership with Seattle Parks & Recreation and the community, are co-creating design concepts that promote pedestrian and bicycle uses and increase safety for everyone that travels along Lake Washington Boulevard. 

Updated August 28, 2023

Lake Washington Blvd Visioning Background

In response to the pandemic, during summer 2020, we closed 3 miles of Lake Washington Blvd to cars and opened it for people to walk, bike, roller skate, scoot, etc. Building off that success and an outreach campaign in early 2021, SDOT moved forward with closing 3 miles of Lake Washington Blvd to cars on the weekends and holidays from July 2021 to October 2021.   
  
Following up on that work, and thanks to Councilmember Tammy Morales, we secured $200,000 through the 2022 budget to explore the right balance of closures and possible permanent operational changes to promote more walking, rolling, and biking on Lake Washington Blvd going forward.   
 
“South Seattle has constantly been left out of the conversation when it comes to increasing safety in mobility. There are over four thousand miles of road in this city, and less than one percent of it is actual protected bike infrastructure. I’m excited to see positive changes that will increase pedestrian safety moving forward, and I’m proud our office was able to secure this funding and ensure that there will be a participatory process to engage our community members.” - Councilmember Tammy J. Morales 
 
Last summer, we launched a visioning process while Seattle Parks and Recreation hosted Bicycle “Weekends” For more information about Bicycle “Weekends” please see Parks latest blog found here. The visioning process, which included convening a paid 12-person Task Force of a diverse group of stakeholders to share experiences and discuss opportunities for Lake Washington Blvd. The Task Force helped design the public engagement process, including development of the online survey content. The results of this survey helped us understand what's working well along Lake Washington Boulevard, what could be improved, and how we can enhance safety and the overall traveler experience. We published a blog post to share more information about this survey and visioning process.

The purpose of this process is to inform the development of a framework for how SDOT should make decisions about, future improvements, and changes to Lake Washington Blvd.   

People enjoying Lake Washington Blvd on their bikes.

Visioning Process Timeline