Rantz: Activists aim to severely restrict cars, business deliveries on The Ave

If activists get their way, “The Ave” in Seattle’s U District will see severe restrictions on cars and potentially debilitating delivery delays for businesses. But they’ll get some more bike lanes no one will use, so that will make up for it.

A group of U District activists have been working Seattle City Councilmember Rob Johnson to help deal with the traffic conundrums the Husky Stadium light rail has caused. They argue the bus transfers from the light rail stop into U District have causes some nightmares.

“The transfers between buses and light rail were horrendous,” activist Cory Crocker told The Seattle Times.

Consequently, as the new light rail station in the U District is set to open in 2021, Crocker and others want to be ready for it. Normally, that would mean you allow for more housing, upzoning, etc. But not if you want to “Keep the U District unique” as Croker’s activist shirt explains, on full display in the Times.

For these activists, getting the area ready means severely restricting cars on The Ave, forcing businesses to have their deliveries made in “early morning hours” instead of throughout the day. They also want to designate 12th Avenue NE as “a bicycle corridor for leisurely travel” and bike lanes on 11th Avenue NW and Roosevelt Avenue NE for bike commuters (which have consistently declined over the last several years).

They came up with these recommendations with the help of Councilmember Johnson, a rabid anti-car activist who helps bring bike lanes to neighborhoods that don’t want or need them. It’s why he’s become so deeply unpopular with so many voters.

Johnson, for the most part, has escaped much scrutiny. His fellow car-hating colleague Mike O’Brien has received the brunt of the criticism because he generally seeks out media attention with faux-maudlin, over-the-top monologues about safety.

“We should have a city … whether you’re biking to work or walking across the street to go to the park or pick or groceries or a cup of coffee, that it’s not an act of bravery … we can do better,” he once claimed.

We, of course, already live in that city.

But those types of insane comments have allowed Johnson to work under-the-radar, working closely with militant bike activists and the Seattle Department of Transportation to transform neighborhoods with unused bike lanes that hurt businesses. Johnson is no less extreme than O’Brien. Johnson claimed it’s a “moral imperative” to install bike lanes, and has used shoddy data to make his case.

Thanks to the work of one group, Save 35th Ave, Johnson has been outed for his bike-lanes-at-all-cost agenda.

And while he’s working behind the scenes, he’s been able to enact some detrimental change. Hopefully, now that there’s a spotlight on the move in the U District, folks can stop him and his activist friends before they attempt their social experiment there.

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