The busiest stretch of pavement in Shoreline was built to replace a train, and the city is now building a second trail to keep up with a different one. That is the whole story of how a three-mile bike path along Aurora Avenue quietly became more central to daily life here than the road it parallels, and why City Hall spent a Saturday in September testing lawn chairs and food carts on a strip of grass across the street from its own front door.
Start with the ground itself. Tucked into the linear park across from Shoreline City Hall sits a short, sunken section of brick roughly three to four feet lower than the sidewalks around it. City planning documents call it Ronald Place, and it is what remains of the old North Trunk Road, the route that once carried the Seattle-Everett Interurban Trolley through this stretch of what was then unincorporated King County. Most people walking or biking past it have no reason to know it is there. It is also the reason the trail next to it exists at all.
The Trolley Line That Left a Corridor Behind
The Interurban ran electric rail cars between Seattle and Everett from 1910 through 1939. It lost the fight against cars and buses the way most interurban lines did, and when it folded, the rails themselves were sold to Japan for scrap in 1939 and 1940. What was left was a right of way, a strip of land with no train on it, running north-south through the middle of what would become the city of Shoreline. Decades later, that abandoned corridor became the Interurban Trail, a paved, mostly car-free path that now runs about three miles from the Seattle city line at North 145th Street to the Snohomish County line, tucked into the Seattle City Light transmission easement alongside Aurora Avenue.
The trail did not replace the trolley's function so much as inherit its footprint. It runs through one of the more densely populated slices of the city, an area King County and state trail planners have measured at roughly 5,000 residents per square mile, which is part of why the corridor keeps showing up in every subsequent plan the city writes for itself.
What's Actually Running Along It Now
Walk or ride the trail on a given weekend and it strings together a surprising amount of what people in Shoreline actually do for fun. Ridgecrest Public House, a short detour off the trail near Ridgecrest Park, runs a different food truck most evenings and pours from a rotating tap list, making it one of the more reliable weeknight stops in that part of the city. Darrell's Tavern, closer to the trail's northern stretch, has built its reputation on a steady live music lineup rather than any single headline act. Aurora Borealis, the event center on Aurora Avenue North, covers the rest of the calendar with comedy nights, country line dancing, trivia, and touring tribute bands, several booked well into October.
Third Place Commons, the public gathering space built around Lake Forest Park's town center, sits close enough to the trail's southern reach to function as an extension of it, hosting things like community sing-alongs and a standing giant chess set that draws its own regulars. The weekly Shoreline Farmers Market rounds things out as the corridor's daytime anchor, a stop that shows up in nearly every local guide to a Shoreline weekend for the same reason: it is walkable from most of the neighborhoods the trail passes through.
None of this is new exactly. What is new is how much weight the city is now asking this one strip of pavement to carry.
Why City Hall Spent a Saturday Testing Lawn Chairs
On Saturday, September 12, 2026, the City of Shoreline turned Park at Town Center, the small green space at 17550 Aurora Ave N that sits directly on the Interurban Trail, into a four-hour experiment. Staff set up temporary seating structures, gathering spaces, games, food vendors, and art installations, then watched how people actually used them. The event was framed as part of an update to the Town Center Subarea Plan, the zoning and design framework that governs the blocks around City Hall, Shorewood High School, and the Fire Department headquarters.
That plan is not being rewritten from scratch. It has existed since the 2010s, built around the assumption that Aurora would eventually get bus rapid transit and that light rail would later arrive in the area. Both of those predictions came true. Shoreline South/148th and Shoreline North/185th stations opened on August 30, 2024, as part of Sound Transit's Lynnwood Link extension.
The pace of what followed is why the plan needs updating now rather than later. According to the city's own project materials for the light rail subarea plans, the original planned actions for both station areas were written with about 20 years of growth in mind, covering projected development through 2035 and accounting for up to 2,214 new housing units near 148th and 2,190 near 185th. Ten years in, the city reports it is already more than halfway through that twenty-year growth allowance. A framework built to last two decades is tracking to fill up in one.
That is the practical reason a park bench demonstration mattered. If growth is arriving twice as fast as planned, the public spaces meant to absorb it, including the trail that runs through the middle of all of it, need to be figured out well ahead of schedule rather than whenever the original timeline assumed there would be time.
The Second Trail, Built for the Train That Won
The Interurban wasn't built to serve light rail. It predates light rail by well over a century. But its success as a walking and biking corridor is now the direct template for a second trail the city is trying to build specifically for the light rail era: the Trail Along the Rail.
The concept is a 2.5-mile shared-use path running roughly parallel to the light rail alignment itself, from North 145th Street to Northeast 195th Street on the east side of I-5, the opposite side of the freeway from the original Interurban corridor. About 20 non-contiguous blocks of it already exist, built by Sound Transit as part of light rail construction. The city has separately completed rough grading and a retaining wall along the western edge of Ridgecrest Park to make room for a future segment, along with pedestrian and bike improvements on 5th Avenue NE between NE 175th Street and NE 182nd Court that already tie into the planned route. The city has a grant application pending that would fund development of a full master plan, and if that funding comes through, public outreach on the remaining gaps is expected in late 2026 or early 2027.
The pitch for the new trail echoes the old one almost exactly: a direct, car-free connection to Ridgecrest Park and North City Park, and a way to reach the 148th and 185th light rail stations on foot or by bike rather than by car, extending eventually to the pedestrian bridge planned over I-5 at NE 195th Street. Shoreline built one trail on the grave of a failed railway and is now sketching a second one to keep pace with a railway that is working better than planners expected. Both times, the city's answer to a transit shift was the same instinct: pave a path next to the tracks and let people walk to what comes next.
The Fall Calendar Is Already Using the Spine
The corridor's cultural programming has started to lean on this geography rather than sit apart from it. ShoreLake Arts, the nonprofit formerly known as the Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Arts Council, has an event at Shoreline Community College's PUB Building on October 17, followed by a curated art display at Ridgecrest Public House on November 1, an Outdoor Arts Market on November 21, and Holiday Shorelights on December 4. Artists have until October 6 to register for this year's 6x6 NW showcase through the same organization. Every one of those stops sits within an easy walk or short ride of the Interurban Trail or its planned eastern counterpart, which means a resident who starts at the farmers market on a Saturday morning can end up at a gallery opening three blocks off the same path that afternoon without touching a car.
The brick fragment across from City Hall is easy to miss and was never meant to be a destination. It is a leftover from a transit system that lost, sitting a few feet from a park the city is actively redesigning around a transit system that is winning. Shoreline keeps building trails next to whatever rail line came before, and the corridor that used to carry a trolley to Everett is still doing the job a century later, just on foot.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of the Interurban Trail or wondering what a specific Shoreline address is worth in today's market, the Knoblaugh Team can walk you through it street by street.
