Driving a car on the cobblestones under the iconic Pike Place Market sign has been a Seattleite’s birthright for as long as cars have been in the city. But anybody who has actually engaged in this strange, inconvenient option is left immediately asking a single question: Why are we doing this? 

This spring, the city itself finally asked this question and began testing a pilot program that restricted access to Western Avenue along the market to pedestrians. On Pike Place’s final day of vehicle free-for-all before the pilot launched, pedestrians, for all intents and purposes, already owned the street. Tote-bagged shoppers leisurely strolled down those cobblestones, an SUV tailing them at a snail’s pace; strangers precariously played traffic cop, helping drivers reverse out of marketside parking spots into swarms of people who simply could not give a damn.

For years, people have tried to get the 118-year-old market to budge from tradition. The concept of a pedestrian-centric market has long garnered overwhelming support among the public and elected officials. Gordon Padelford, executive director of nonprofit Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, has the data to back that up: 81 percent of Seattleites supported a car-free market in 2021, and subsequent polling proved they’d even be willing to shell out extra transportation tax to fund such a project.

Rachel Ligtenberg recalls that her very first media interview on the job as Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority (PDA) executive director included questions about her plans for pedestrian-car relations on the street; it was clear this was a major pain point.

Elsewhere in the market, longtime worker Emily Pike spearheaded a grassroots movement among market vendors calling on the PDA to seriously look into reducing personal vehicle traffic. For years, general consensus held that market vendors were against car restrictions. Had anyone bothered to ask them, Pike knew from near-daily conversations about distracted drivers and annoyingly inefficient deliveries, most were in favor of trying something—anything—else. Pike gathered about 150 signatures on a petition to rethink the street’s use. “There is a strong trend toward, at minimum, we can do better, even if there’s some degree of disagreement about what the final outcome is,” Pike says, “There seems to be a very broad consensus that what we’ve been doing is not ideal.”

The reduced-vehicle pilot came as a monumental turning point, a moment when car culture in the market was finally questioned. But it didn’t come easily.

“Changing the status quo in cities is always hard. It usually takes strong direction from a mayor to make a big change. That's what we see all around the world, and I think that was true in Seattle as well,” Padelford says. For his part, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2025 State of the City speech called on stakeholders to make the market “one of the greatest pedestrian experiences in the country” using “ingenuity—and, frankly, common sense.” The call came in the wake of deadly truck attack on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street and ahead of the influx of FIFA World Cup fans expected next year.

While adjusting traffic flow within the Seattle landmark might indeed be common sense, a quagmire of governing organizations within the market and the power of entrenched patterns have kept change in the backseat for years.

It took the stars aligning—new leadership, tireless organizing, clear mayoral direction, an impending FIFA tourism boom, plus the planned disruption of multiple on-street construction projects—to finally get…a test run of fewer cars.

A month into the pilot, the scene along Pike Place was a little different. “It’s a working market,” Ligtenberg says. “There are definitely still some vehicles.” Now, though, those vehicles support the market’s essential needs: a pickup truck delivering loads of greenery to a flower stall, a customer receiving a curbside order from the driver’s seat of a sedan, visitors seeking accessible parking, and emergency responders.

Cars have always been a part of Pike Place Market. Model Ts parked next to horse-drawn carriages in the market’s infancy, and wagons served as the first vendor stalls. Drivers will continue to roll down Pike Place and Western in some way, shape, or form, but the pilot’s learning phase hopes to nix unnecessary rideshares or sightseeing rubberneckers from the largely pedestrian thoroughfare.

Ligtenberg’s hope? “That folks feel like it is an even more compelling and enriching experience to be in the market. And to be in the market means also to be on Pike Place the street.”