Seattle Streets Alliance
Key Wins from Our First 15 Years
Over the past fifteen years, Seattle Streets Alliance has helped deliver real, on-the-ground change across the city.
- Improving safety by winning safer speed limits citywide, giving pedestrians a head start at crosswalks as the default policy, and holding the city accountable for transforming our most dangerous streets. Our staff and neighborhood volunteers gathered stories, built people power, and pushed the City to act on proven safety measures.
- Making more walkable communities by securing record investments in sidewalks and crosswalks through two transportation levies — including the largest sidewalk expansion in Seattle’s history, starting in 2024. We organized neighbors across the city and rallied with allies to strengthen these investments.
- Creating a bikeable downtown and beyond by envisioning and successfully advocating for protected bike lanes that criss-cross the city-center, and connect to surrounding neighborhoods with 55 miles of neighborhood greenways and 31 miles of protected bike lanes. Our staff and volunteers showed up at open houses, testified at City Hall, and worked with partners to keep key projects on track.
- Partnering with community leaders in South Seattle to bring safe streets to walk and bike on to historically underserved communities, like the Beacon Ave safety project on Beacon Hill, the Georgetown to South Park Trail, and the MLK Jr Way S safety project connecting the Central District and the Rainier Valley. We also intentionally create and fund BIPOC-led advocacy spaces including the MLK Transportation Justice Team and the Rainier Ave Youth Committee, and fiscally sponsoring the independent Whose Streets? Our Streets! This work lifts up BIPOC community priorities, amplifies those campaigns, centers safety and access in neighborhoods that have borne the brunt of traffic violence and disinvestment, and builds organizing capacity and skills in BIPOC youth.
- Laying the groundwork for the new People Streets program at SDOT, which is tasked with transforming our streets into community places for people, like pedestrianizing Pike Place Market.
Our Recent Impact
Reimagining Pike Place for People
Seattle’s iconic Pike Place Market is experimenting with a bold idea: limiting vehicle access to create a safer, more welcoming space for everyone who shops, works, and visits. This year-long pilot comes after years of our work building support for a people-friendly Pike Place — conducting polling, listening to market vendors, passing and funding the People Streets program, and mobilizing thousands of Seattleites to voice support.
In our current push to make this pilot permanent, we know this isn’t just about one street — it’s about reimagining Seattle’s public spaces to prioritize people over cars.
Watch the video conversation with Kenji López-Alt and Ray Delahanty.
Growing the Bike Network in Southeast Seattle
For over a decade, Beacon Hill Safe Streets has been organizing, advocating, and fighting for safer streets in Southeast Seattle. In 2025, that work paid off in a big way with the opening of new bike lanes and pedestrian improvements along 15th Ave S and Beacon Ave S. This transforms a critical corridor for people biking, walking, and riding transit.
Now we're advocating to extend the changes all the way south to 39th Ave S — completing the vision of a truly connected Beacon Hill that is a safer, healthier, and more welcoming place for everyone.
Connecting Communities in the Duwamish Valley
Georgetown and South Park are only 1.8 miles apart, but without safe ways to walk or bike, this short distance has felt like a world away. For decades, community leaders have pushed for a safe trail to connect the two neighborhoods. In 2017, their organizing secured funding for design, and in 2019, they won more funding to keep the project moving. In 2025, we finally celebrated the opening of the Georgetown to South Park Trail, along with a new connection providing a protected route from the heart of Georgetown through SODO.
These routes lay the groundwork for the next phase of advocacy to close the remaining gaps in the Duwamish Valley bike network — and fully connect to the rest of Seattle's bike network to the north, south, east, and west.
Watch our short video and read more in the SNG Blog.
Completing the Downtown Waterfront Trail
Early this year, we celebrated the opening of the new protected trail along the downtown waterfront. This summer, thanks to community advocacy and thoughtful adjustments, that trail was finally connected to the Elliott Bay Trail via a brand-new protected bike lane on the west side (along the water) of Alaskan Way. This half-mile link fills a critical gap between the newly rebuilt waterfront trail and some of Seattle’s most-used bike routes, with connections to Ballard, West Seattle, Downtown, and beyond.
Planning for walkable and affordable neighborhoods
We envision a city where everyone can walk or roll to grocery stores, parks, childcare facilities, cultural spaces and pharmacies. But right now, only 44% of Seattleites can walk to basic daily necessities, and the housing shortage is making Seattle increasingly unaffordable — pushing people out of the city and forcing them into long car commutes. This fall, we succeeded in legalizing commercial and community spaces in every neighborhood through Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan. This Comp Plan Update will determine land use in the city for the next 20 years — laying the groundwork for a future where everyone has access to a walkable corner store.
Read more about our progress to create walkable neighborhoods.
How We Create Change
Seattle Streets Alliance’s work is rooted in grassroots organizing because we believe that local people have the knowledge and capability to change their communities for the better.
We deliver our mission in coalition with volunteer-led neighborhood groups that identify community needs, develop local solutions, and lead local campaigns to make Seattle’s streets safer for everyone. Together, these groups form a grassroots alliance that elects our board of directors and sets our annual citywide advocacy priorities.
Seattle Streets Alliance citywide staff provide policy and organizing expertise, strategic planning and citywide campaign coordination, coalition building with partners and allies, leadership development for neighborhood groups, and communications and media support.
Together, we build grassroots people power and movement power to shape city policy, priorities, and funding — and deliver on-the-ground change that make Seattle's streets safer and more welcoming.
Our work is powered by volunteers and donors like you.
Learn more about how to get involved.
More About Our Impact
For a more detailed, year‑by‑year look at our work, see our Impact Archive.