The city is making repairs to the Duwamish Trail this week. From SDOT:
Repairs are underway on the Duwamish Trail in West Seattle. The asphalt trail has been heavily damaged in places by tree roots and needs to be repaired for bicyclist and pedestrian safety. SDOT crews are grinding off the old asphalt, trimming trees, cutting roots, and placing new asphalt this week, weather permitting, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. The crews are assisting pedestrians and bicyclists around the work area. Due to weather conditions, the trail is muddy in the work area. Bicyclists may need to dismount and walk their bikes in places.
Funding for this project is provided by the Bridging the Gap transportation initiative approved by Seattle voters.
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8 responses to “City repairing West Seattle’s Duwamish Trail this week”
Are they going to do anything about the fact that its north terminus ends abruptly half a mile from any connecting road or trail and dumps users unceremoniously into the 40 mph traffic across four lanes from the sidewalk (which I take it is SDOT’s vision as to where the cyclists are supposed to go next)
I’m guessing not. And in case you haven’t guessed, I’m not a fan of this glorified sidewalk; this is a case of mediocre infrastructure shoehorned in where it’s expedient and cheap rather than where it’s transportationally sensible.
I know vehicular cycling gets a bum rap, but rather than putting a trail across a large number of industrial site driveways with fence and foliage-induced limited sight distance, we’d be better off lowering the speed limit and demanding that motorists take care around cyclists on the roadway.
Is it mandatory to use the trail? If not, the vehicular approach says “deal with it.” While I’m not a fan of same, some people love glorified sidewalks. I’m also not a fan of simply lowering speed limits and hoping that motorist behavior will change as a result of a new sign.
The ‘glorified sidewalk’ is only for a short distance and has great sightlines. The trail is diverted onto SW Dakota and then follows 16th to the WS bridge. While I’ll admit that 16th is not ideal in terms of the broken glass and general trash on the street it is quiet and offers an alternative to the sidewalk. It is sad that the trail so unceremoniously stops where it does. At least SDOT put in a light and widened the sidewalk on the west side. It used to be a lot lot worse. And I’ll take the small improvements as these help make the route less intimidating to other riders even if they don’t do much for me.
In general, the southend needs more money directed its way to develop the bike infrastructure and get past the hodge podge we have currently.
They actually began some of the work the middle of last week. One of the nice things that they are doing is removing all the old metal bollard receivers sunk into the middle of the trail at all the driveways. The bollards themselves were removed long ago. These were a serious hazard. There was a whole bunch of spray paint on the asphalt where the trail jogs away from the road around that trailer storage yard. It was good asphalt there, so it will be interesting to see what they are doing.
While the trail implementation isn’t that great, I have to say that almost all the truckers coming across the trail go out of their way to yield or back up if they see a bike coming down the trail. Huge amounts of courtesy displayed. The worst section is at the south end where goes in front of industrial park like buildings, the people zipping in and out of these locations seem to have little regard for the bike traffic.
I never cross the street at the north end of the trail, I always just ride on the street. At the time of day I’m going through most of the vehicle traffic just moves over to the fast lane to go around.
Actually I think these trails running through the south of downtown need the most attention. So much attention is focused on the BGT and northern Interurban Trail that I feel the biking community should focus on the trails that connect the south end to the downtown. The DT is the weakest of them all and needs improvements and The Duwamish and Green River Trails should be better interconnected. The South Park section is a nightmare. I like to think, for example, the $6 million dollars spent on the Lake Forest Park section of the BGT would have gone a lot further here.
I don’t mind riding the Southpark section, but there are so many criss-crossing routes it is tough if you don’t really know the area. The signage needs some improvement. I completely agree that connecting the south end should be a priority. Southpark is going to get worse again when the new 16th Ave S bridge opens. The closing of the bridge greatly reduced the traffic on 14th. I have no idea what improvements they might add for cyclist when the bridge opens. It looks like the road is going to get realigned to the bridge, the new bridge is being built north of the old structure.
[…] city recently completed some repaving on the Duwamish Trail. They followed up the work with something of a love letter to […]
After having ridden through there a bunch since the work was complete I still can’t figure out what the re-paving was about. Nothing seemed wrong with those sections. The bollard removal seemed like the good part of the project.