I say just permanently close Broadway to car traffic and make it pedestrian friendly. Let the shops and restaurants take over the street and sidewalk.

@2: Then that just shoves the traffic onto 12th and 15th. Then forget about dropping your party off for dinner at a Broadway restaurant and then finding parking. Or how about getting that large antique in your car or back home? And of course, most of the time it's soggy and raining in the winter - so enjoy your January post Christmas street fair shopping.

Like it or not, car culture breaths life into commerce that's vital for the shops and restaurants to survive. That's the reason the Pike Place Market will always have cars, despite decades of tiresome car bashing epiphanies.

@#2: not a bad idea, some allowance would need to be made for deliveries of course, and a path for emergency vehicles.

I've been advocating to remove most POV's from cities for years, the city should be for pedestrians

@6 Agreed
Why they put car traffic, and above ground trolley on top of below ground light rail, in addition to bike lines and pedestrian traffic all on N-S corridor Broadway is beyond me.
Eliminating car traffic would alleviate some of the crowding.

Shut down Broadway and make it an RV safelot. It's just 15 seconds from beloved camping spot Cal Anderson Park, after all.
All that empty concrete space just to allow pedestrians to enjoy the spoils of capitalism shopping the day away while their neighbors are suffering? Not on my watch.
I'm just here with radical solutions to big problems.