I tried to drive in Seattle one time about 15 years ago. As far as I can tell, the lane markers and other road paint in Seattle must be designed to become completely invisible as soon as the road gets wet. And it's wet a lot.

So ... short version of history:

Seattle was not originally 'Seattle'.

It was a bunch of different smaller towns, all nearby each other, that grew outward toward each other.

As a result, there were many differently oriented street grid layouts... that roughly all smashed into each other at downtown/pioneer square.

The... the meeting where multiple proponents of different street grids, basically mayors of the smaller but now merging towns... where they were supposed to agree on how to make a unified system?

Literally devolved into a a brawl, a melee.

... That's why Seattle's street layout fundamentally makes no sense.

That and the pretty extreme terrain. Try walking all the way up Pike or Pine, from Pike Place Market, all the way up to Capitol Hill.

Steep grades, lots of hills.

Check out the Seattle Underground tour if you want a more comprehensive explanation of this batshittery, lol.

The only people that use to drive through there were tourists that put the location in their GPS and then got stuck.

Them and delivery/Uber drivers.

Ugh. The amount of Uber drivers that actually dropped people off in the middle of Pike Plac was infuriating.

They definitely won't, the prices will just go up to match the rents. Last time I was there the line was insanely long, raising prices certainly wouldn't deter the majority of their customers.

Yep, that is indeed what it boils down to because it's a major tourist attraction for people coming in to visit Seattle. So the city councilperson argued that it would reduce people visiting if they had to park far away.

Glad to see they were wrong.

The absolutely baffling thing is that that one particular stretch of road has been being shut down to car traffic for various events for like... decades.

Its very widely a social faux pas to drive on that street during busy market hours, becsause it has always been full of pedestrians without it even being blocked off, again, for decades.

They'll regularly have overflow marker stalls, or just functionally limit it to market stall shopkeeps unloading or packing up their stuff.

The only people who would be against this like 1/8 of a mile of road that is nearly always swarming with people just finally being formally classed as 'no cars' are fucking idiots and/or obscenely privileged suburbanites who cannot understand the concept of walking.

There is literally a (or multiple) parking garage(s) under the Market. You can park in it, and emerge just literally in the Market.

https://www.pikeplacemarket.org/parking-directions/

Its just that it doesn't work so well for modern, literally larger than a WW2 M4 Sherman tank, automobiles.

If you wanna zip around Seattle and actually be able to park, get a subcompact.

It can be done, I've done it, for a decade.

Your F-350 is shit outta luck though.

Yes, even if you could legally drive in Pike's Place, for all intents and purposes, you might as well say that you couldn't drive there before. Those politicians who said nobody would shop there were either lying through their teeth or completely uninformed.

At least now it's a possibility.

Yeah, I live in Seattle and have been to Pike Place many a time. Having cars down there was fucking deranged. Neither the pedestrians nor the drivers could possibly have been happy about the situation.

there’s something to it though, being crammed on the sidewalk in the pouring rain, alongside a million other people on this tiny little sidewalk, around all the various hidden and famous shops and importers.

Yeah for me this was the feeling of "fuck seattle" and "i'm never coming back here." But now it's looking much better.

This plus the light rail build out has made living here without a car so much more pleasant. If only the rail went all the way up to Everett...

Awww c'mon, you don't wanna torture motorists? Y'all don't have a sense of whimsey and bloodlust.

It's not really a place for shipping.