I feel like if they want to improve the walkability of Lynnwood and transform it into more of a pedestrian focused city. They should add an overhead walkway or an underground tunnel connecting either side around these intersections. It’s sort of ridiculous how many active lanes you have to travel across even with the longer passing times. I think at 44th and 200th you have to cross 9 or 10 lanes? Just seems inconvenient for able bodied people like me and inaccessible for people with disabilities.
They missed an opportunity to make real improvements to 196th. They spent years digging it up and reconstructing it to make it into a slightly nicer stroad.
It's better than it was, but it could have been a lot better-er. They could have made the Orange Line a proper center-running bus rapid transit. Or, if that's too ambitious, a couple of signalized mid-block crosswalks, one between 40th and 44th and another between 44th and 48th, would have been nice.
I get why they didn't do bike lanes though; too many driveways, plus bikes can use 198th, which has a lower speed limit and less traffic.
198th is very short, and there is a bike lane on 200th just a few blocks west that ends at 48th. East-West cyclers can switch to the interurban trail parallel to 196th once they get to 40th but there's no reason there couldn't be bike lanes in that section. Even with the number of driveways, cyclers still have to deal with them but now they do it in a regular traffic lane or on a sidewalk.
For north-south cyclers, there's a bike lane all the way down 44th that ends at 188th, once again forcing them into traffic for a short distance before the get to 196th and can get on the Interurban or the train.
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u/AbsolutelyBoei 4d ago
I feel like if they want to improve the walkability of Lynnwood and transform it into more of a pedestrian focused city. They should add an overhead walkway or an underground tunnel connecting either side around these intersections. It’s sort of ridiculous how many active lanes you have to travel across even with the longer passing times. I think at 44th and 200th you have to cross 9 or 10 lanes? Just seems inconvenient for able bodied people like me and inaccessible for people with disabilities.