page_title: Mercer Street (Seattle)
section_title: Street description
hierarchical_section_title: Mercer Street (Seattle) / Street description
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Mercer Street, Seattle, Washington, US.
context_page_description: Mercer Street is a major east–west thoroughfare in the Lower Queen Anne and South Lake Union neighborhoods of Seattle, Washington. It travels 2 miles and connects Elliott Avenue to the west and Interstate 5 to the east, serving as one of several downtown exits on the freeway. The street carries an average weekday volume of 38,000 vehicles on its central section.
context_section_description: Mercer Street begins as Mercer Place, at an intersection with Elliot Avenue West between the Elliott Bay waterfront and Kinnear Park on Queen Anne Hill. The narrow road travels southeast up a short hill to 5th Avenue West, where it turns due east onto West Mercer Street. The street passes through the built-up Lower Queen Anne neighborhood and widens to four lanes at Queen Anne Avenue. Mercer Street continues east through the north part of the Seattle Center, passing the Seattle Repertory Theatre, McCaw Hall, and Memorial Stadium.
  The street then passes the headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and gains a protected bike lane on its north side as it passes under Aurora Avenue North (State Route 99). Mercer Street travels east through South Lake Union as a landscaped boulevard with six lanes, passing between the campuses of Amazon.com and Google, to the south and north respectively. The street crosses the path of the South Lake Union Streetcar at Westlake and Terry avenues, just south of Lake Union Park and the Museum of History and Industry. After Fairview Avenue, Mercer enters an interchange with Interstate 5, with direct ramps to the freeway and its reversible express lanes. Several short neighborhood streets in Capitol Hill, Madison Valley, and Washington Park are also named East Mercer Street but are discontinuous from one another.
  The downtown section of Mercer Street is classified as a major arterial street and is part of the National Highway System, a network of roads identified as important to the national economy, defense, and mobility. It is also one of the busiest streets in Seattle, carrying an average weekday traffic volume of 38,000 vehicles between Taylor and Dexter avenues and 66,100 vehicles on the approach to I-5. Its least-traveled section, near Elliott Avenue, carried only 11,000 vehicles on an average weekday in 2016. The street also has a short protected bicycle lane under Aurora Avenue that carries an average of 190 bicyclists per day.
caption: W. Mercer Place (red), W. Mercer Street (light blue), Mercer Street, and E. Mercer Street (dark blue)
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "96", "Image YResolution": "96", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image ExifOffset": "90", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2400", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1000"}