Why is Seattle’s Third Avenue not recovering? It just might be the buses

The software engineer Steven Sinofsky, formerly the head of Microsoft’s Windows division, was wandering around downtown Seattle recently when he ran into “The Problem.”

“The street has decayed to a hostile state as the majority of businesses have closed,” Sinofsky summed up in a social media post that ended up causing a bit of a stir. “The bus stops are open air drug use/markets. The buildings all but abandoned.”

He was talking about Third Avenue, and it’s hardly news that something has gone terribly awry there. In some stretches the north-south arterial is overwhelmed by drugs and despair, in others by concrete emptiness.

Sinofsky, though, pinned the crux of it on something else: the buses.

Third Avenue, for 13 hours a day, has been effectively closed to any traffic except buses since 2018. About 300 per hour rumble through, and little else.

“The Pike/Pine corridor has long (decades) been a problem area for the city,” Sinofsky said. “But the whole of 3rd avenue is a new development, as closing off car traffic caused business traffic/access to drop to zero … and the bus stops to become campsites/drug markets.”

This prompted a backlash, which I’ll get to in a minute.

The pandemic and anti-police protests had a lot to do with businesses closing, so it’s more complicated than he presented. But Sinofsky hit on something that I think is crucial about the prospects for a Third Avenue comeback.

I spent time on two recent days walking from Belltown to Pioneer Square and back, talking to folks on downtown Seattle’s three central avenues — Second, Third and Fourth. The sense I came away with is that one of these is not at all like the others.

Both Second and Fourth seem to be recovering, in fits and starts, from the depths of the pandemic and riots.

They are busy downtown streets, sometimes lively. While hardly perfect — especially in the troubled area police call “The Blade” near Pike and Pine streets — there are businesses open throughout most blocks. There’s a mix of buses, cars, bikes and pedestrians, which is exactly what urban planners hope to see for city vitality.

Third Avenue though is the opposite of a “complete street.” It’s a monoculture — it’s got buses and that’s it. There are generally few pedestrians, except in the area of The Blade. And there the crowds are often engaged in more of an underground economy.

I doubt there’s much causal relationship between a bus-only corridor and drug markets. But there is some synergy. The police say drug markets can and do piggyback on the shifting crowds at bus stops, even as it obviously isn’t the case that bus stops prompt urban disorder all on their own.

Drugs aside, it doesn’t seem a coincidence that the streets immediately adjacent to bus-only Third are recovering much better and faster than it is.

The southern parts of Third Avenue show what planners are up against. There, it feels like you’re in a smaller city, even with the skyscrapers. The streets alternate between clogs of noisy buses and being completely empty. There’s not much urban disorder, but neither is there urban energy.

Several shop owners used the same term for the feeling of it: “no man’s land.”

Third Avenue has been called the “hardest working transit street in America,” which is great. But it’s hardly working for anything else. So why not mix some of the buses over onto nearby avenues, letting cars — and hopefully more people, too — back onto Third?

This past week, the Urban Land Institute released a report with ideas on how to fix Third Avenue. It scarcely mentions buses. The group was chaired by attorney John Hempelmann, who lives downtown, so I asked him about it.

“I went into this saying we’ve got to get some of these buses off Third Avenue,” he told me. “But we concluded we couldn’t. That spine is seen as so important in linking south to north for the city that the transit agencies are absolutely committed to it.

“That’s the reality,” he said. “The buses are staying. In fact there’s going to be more buses on Third Avenue in the short term.”

Rather than reconsider the busway, the city and King County Metro right now are expanding it three blocks farther north into Belltown. Hempelmann said planners worry the adjacent avenues might not be able to handle many of Third Avenue’s buses.

Hempelmann’s group instead recommended a series of immediate cosmetic fixes to Third Avenue. Such as: daily cleaning of streets and curbs, brighter lighting, new bus shelters, more street events and a formal city program to appoint block watch captains. The report suggests the city “invite joy through banners, art, and branding,” intended to spread the avenue’s “unique identity.”

All that will probably help, but the challenge is that Third Avenue’s unique identity right now is the buses and the drugs. That’s the brand. Seems like we’ve got to change one or both of those things, or else it’s tough to see much shifting.

Sinofsky, the software engineer, got blowback for even suggesting the buses might be part of the problem. So, previously, did the developer Greg Smith, when he proposed kicking all the buses off Third in favor of a pedestrian-only promenade.

“You’re conflating transit infrastructure with societal ills,” one commenter told Sinofsky. “Removing bus stops does no more to alleviate the drug addiction crisis than cutting off my arm helps lose weight.”

It would surely be nicer to stroll along the avenue, though, or to run a business there, if it were more of a complete street.

Some city boosters have also branded Third Avenue as “Seattle’s front door.” So think of it this way: If we were starting from scratch, would anybody ever agree that our city’s front door ought to be a giant bus mall?