Shoreline street ends in Seattle
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In 1996, the city of Seattle, Washington adopted a resolution to preserve shoreline street ends (sometimes referred to as SSEs) throughout the city as public rights-of-way, to allow improvements for public uses and access.[1] This resolution gave a broad outline of considerations that would apply to public access improvements to shoreline street ends and to removing private encroachments and severely limiting future permits for private uses of street ends.[1] Three years later, this was enhanced with a statement, "Fees for use of shoreline street ends may take into consideration City policy of discouraging encroachments inconsistent with the public right of access to shorelines and may be included in the schedule of fees for use of public places under the jurisdiction of Seattle Transportation."[2]
Seattle borders Puget Sound (most notably Elliott Bay, the city's main port) and Lake Washington; the lower Duwamish River and its industrialized estuary known as the Duwamish Waterway flow through the city to Elliott Bay; the Lake Washington Ship Canal bisects the city and includes Lake Union (580 acres (2.3 km2) in its own right[3]); and there are numerous smaller lakes in the city, so many streets end in water. Since the adoption of this resolution, it has been city policy to preserve these numerous street ends for public access. Over the decades since, this has resulted not only in preserved public rights of way, but also in numerous new public parks.
As of 2016, seven of the 149 recognized sites (nine of them along the Duwamish Waterway) still lacked public access. 88 were designated in the city's fact sheet as "worth a visit," and 54 as "not yet ready for visitors." Nine sites, overlapping the last two categories, were in the design and development stage. "[N]early two-thirds" were described as being "in need of improvement, overgrown, or hav[ing] private encroachments."[4]