Harger: Seattle’s RapidRide J Line is spending $156M on Eastlake Avenue. Buses won’t get priority lanes. Bike lanes will.
Mar 19, 2026, 5:00 AM | Updated: 4:58 pm
If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at the way this city spends money, sit down. This one’s for you.
Seattle’s RapidRide J Line is spending $156 million to rebuild Eastlake Avenue for a rapid transit project. The buses won’t get priority lanes through most of it. The road has been torn up for about a year, with another year to go. And when it’s done, nobody can tell you with a straight face that traffic is going to be better for anyone.
But the bike lanes will be great.
We know this firsthand. KIRO Newsradio is on Eastlake Avenue. We’ve been watching the RapidRide J Line construction from our front door since it started. Every morning, our staff navigates the lane closures, the detours, and the construction chaos to get to work. So when Alex Romanzow laid this out in The Eastlake News, it landed a little closer to home than usual.
Out of 5.2 miles of route, only two miles will have dedicated bus lanes. On the main stretch of Eastlake Avenue, from Harvard Ave to East Galer Street, the bus rides in mixed traffic. Through the heart of the neighborhood the project is literally named for. The dedicated road space went to bike lanes.
Here’s who actually uses Eastlake Avenue every day. About 5,000 people on the Route 70 bus. Thousands more in their cars. And somewhere between 3% and 4% of people in the surrounding neighborhood commute by bike. Not the whole city. The neighborhood. That’s who this thing is designed around. Two years of torn-up road, $156 million, and permanently removed parking, built for a tiny slice of local commuters.
The theory, apparently, is that if you make driving miserable enough for long enough and spend enough of other people’s money doing it, everyone will eventually come around, $156 million worth of eventually.
What a fine use of your taxpayer dollars.
To be fair, $28 million of that total is going toward replacing a water main while the road is already torn open. So the pure transit price tag is $128.5 million. Feel better?
How Seattle’s RapidRide J Line Eastlake road diet could make things worse
Narrowing Eastlake Avenue to one general lane in each direction doesn’t eliminate cars. It concentrates them. Romanzow cites a UC Riverside study showing cars emit roughly double the CO2 per mile at speeds under 5 mph. Engineering stop-and-go congestion on a busy Seattle arterial could be increasing the very emissions the project claims to reduce.
So to recap: make driving worse, create more congestion, generate more pollution, and save the environment. Seattle has a gift for this kind of thing.
There’s also the question Romanzow raises about emergency vehicles. With one lane each direction on Eastlake Avenue, if a fire engine needs it, Eastlake shuts down. The bus riders will have to wait. They can look at the bike lanes while they do.
Seattle RapidRide J Line loading zone: across from a shuttered Starbucks
SDOT included a dedicated loading zone on Eastlake Avenue to serve local businesses. Delivery drivers using it have to cross two lanes of active traffic on foot to reach those businesses. That is the approved design. Someone reviewed it. Someone signed off on it. Someone said yes, this is the one.
And the street parking Eastlake Avenue businesses and residents counted on for years is gone permanently. Not during construction. Gone. Replaced by Seattle bike lanes serving 3% to 4% of neighborhood commuters, on a street where businesses were already struggling before the first lane closed.
Let that image settle. A loading zone across from a shuttered Starbucks, on a street that just lost all its parking, is designed so that delivery drivers have to jog through traffic to do their jobs. This is the finished vision. This is what $156 million buys you.
They were told the finished product would be worth the wait. The finished product removes their customers’ parking. Permanently. Worth the wait.
Seattle bike lane controversy: designing for a future that hasn’t arrived
When Eastlake Avenue business owners raised concerns about losing parking and the economic impact on an already struggling Seattle street, SDOT pointed to studies showing Seattle bike lanes have a neutral to positive impact on businesses. The studies exist. According to Romanzow, they were cited without being shared. The message was essentially: we looked at some things, they came out fine, stop asking questions.
He claims community members who pushed back were characterized as opponents of progress. Questioning the RapidRide J Line plan wasn’t treated as useful input. It was treated as an obstacle to be cleared, much like the parking spaces. If you pushed back, you weren’t a concerned Eastlake neighbor with a legitimate point. You were clearly in the pocket of Big Street Parking.
The RapidRide J Line’s stated goals include increasing future bicycle ridership in Seattle. Not serving current cyclists. Not improving reliability for the 5,000 people on Route 70 every weekday. $156 million to encourage behavior that hasn’t happened yet, on a street full of people whose current behavior apparently didn’t fit the vision.
The idea is that once you’ve made driving sufficiently unpleasant, people will change. They’ll get on a bike. They’ll take the bus. They’ll come around. All it takes is enough concrete, enough construction, enough removed parking, and enough of your money. Seattle is very committed to finding out exactly how much that is.
It could have been designed around the people who are actually there. The 5,000 Route 70 bus riders. The drivers. The Eastlake Avenue business owners who built their livelihoods on a neighborhood street with parking out front.
Instead, it was designed around the people Seattle city planners hope will show up someday.
But when it’s done, you’ll really be able to see those bike lanes from the bus window.
As you sit at the light.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
