The East Ballard community is celebrating a new milestone in our journey to improve safety and accessibility at the intersection of 11th Ave NW and NW Market St. After years of advocacy, planning, and persistence, the community has finally secured a new traffic signal and crosswalk that connects two neighborhoods that have been divided by busy Market Street for decades. The project has been a collaborative effort between the East Ballard Community, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and the Ballard-Fremont Neighborhood Greenways group.
The East Ballard Community Association has been advocating for this project since 2013 when we first applied for funding from the Seattle Neighborhood Park and Street Project Fund. While we received some funds in 2015 to create curb bulbs, it wasn’t until Move Seattle funding was granted for the Route 44 Transit-plus multimodal corridor that the new traffic signal was finally made possible.
Earlier this year, Andrew Natzel, Senior Signal Operations Engineer at the Seattle Department of Transportation, and long-time East Ballard Community Association organizer notified the community that signals were going to be installed this spring.
On April 15, 2023, we gathered in the rain to watch the installation of the long-awaited traffic signals and crosswalks, and were excited to be the first to cross the intersection with the push of a button!
Click on the images above to watch the videos or click here to go directly to the photo album.