It’s time for the Bike News Roundup! Here’s a look at some of the transportation stuff floating around the Internet recently.
As always, this is an open thread. Discuss whatever bikey stuff is on your mind in the comments below.
First up, as the city debates very hyperlocal issues related to increasing density and improving affordability in Seattle, perhaps it’s a good time to consider how our decisions fit in a global context:
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It’s Smart To Be Dense from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.
Pacific Northwest News
- Seattle to lower speeds on some busy streets | The Seattle Times
- It’s not your imagination: Pedalpalooza’s big rides are getting bigger – BikePortland.org
- First Hill streetcars running another month behind | The Seattle Times
- Right-of-Way Declaration of Independence & Bill of Rights | The Urbanist
- Plan to massively expand Seattle bike share means delay for Central District service | CHS Capitol Hill Seattle
- Streets Experiments Made This City Engineer a Celebrity Bureaucrat – Next City
- Bike Sharing is Likely Coming to the Eastside | Seattle Transit Blog
- Help the Rexin family after this horrific bicycle crash! | Medical Expenses – YouCaring
- HALA and the $100,000 Question | Sightline Daily
- Traffic death of boy stirs outcry in Issaquah | The Seattle Times
- Petition · WABikes: WAStopLaw: Write legislation and get it introduced in #waleg to allow people on bikes to treat stop signs as yield signs · Change.org
- Dangerous, high-speed pass on neighborhood street caught on camera – BikePortland.org
- Blazing a trail: U.S. Bicycle Route 10 burnishes Washington’s standing as most bike-friendly state in the union | The Spokesman-Review
- Expanding Coverage of a Second Downtown Light Rail Tunnel | Seattle Transit Blog
- Easy Overnighter to Manchester State Park | Washington Bikes
- Tom Rasmussen Going Out in Anti-Development Blaze of Glory | Seattle Met
- Seattle tries to scale back new apartment buildings near single family homes | CHS Capitol Hill Seattle
- Portland cyclist sues for $21 million over skinny bike lane | Q13 FOX News
- Edmonds man bikes, buses over 10,000 miles in 2014 – EdmondsBeacon.com
- Ballard Business Owners: Get Seattle’s Homeless Away From Us! – The Stranger – The Ballard Chamber of Commerce and North Seattle Industrial Association cite people biking nearby as a reason to stop a homeless encampment. What a pile of horse shit! These organizations SUED TO STOP THE BURKE-GILMAN TRAIL MISSING LINK! So some homeless people in tents = Dangerous to people biking. Wheel-grabbing train tracks and shared industrial streets = A-OK!
- It’s July, and they still don’t know when Bertha will tunnel again – Puget Sound Business Journal
- Workers unearth centuries-old artifacts under Seattle bridge – seattlepi.com
- Capital Bicycling Club calls special meeting regarding Chehalis Western Trail closure | The Olympian
- Pronto Cycle Share • #PeopleForPronto Portrait Series (10/10) – Mayor Ed Murray’s first bike was, indeed, a Murray.
- SDOT not worried about concrete slabs under Magnolia Bridge – Queen Anne & Magnolia News
- Don’t Stop Pedaling….Especially on a Fixie | King County Parks Plog – Have you been to the races at the Marymoor velodrome yet?
- Construction Management Plans for ROW Impacts – COMING JULY 6 | SDOT Blog
- The Move Seattle levy doesn’t replace the 90-year-old Magnolia Bridge, and neighbors are furious – Puget Sound Business Journal – It’s time to come up with a different plan if the Magnolia Bridge needs to come down. Replacement doesn’t make sense.
- West Seattle Crime Watch, be-on-the-lookout edition: Small business hit by shoplifter; child saddened by bike thief
- Commuters: Seattle-area traffic stinks, but we’d rather drive alone | The Seattle Times
- Early member spotlight: Cascade co-founder Mike Quam | Cascade Bicycle Club
- Seattle Hands out Gift Cards to Drivers Who Yield to Pedestrians and Cyclists – CityLab
- Finding the Burke-Gilman Trail’s Missing Link | The Urbanist
- Redmond Central Connector wins National Trails and the Arts Award – Redmond Reporter
- Seattle to present 3 options for Burke Gilman ‘missing link’ | King 5
- Portland City Council passes Vision Zero resolution – BikePortland.org
- Licata’s Move Seattle Alternative Isn’t Progressive | The C Is for crank
- Neighbors get hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix problem… | www.kirotv.com
- City Council Committee Restricts Density with Series of NIMBY Amendments | Seattle Politics | Seattle Met
- Crashing on a bicycle in Seattle is not a matter of if, but when – Ron and Don | MyNorthwest.com – Frustrating that he fell on the tracks, but remind me not to go on a bike ride with this guy.
- Snares and Traps for Cyclists | Off The Beaten Path
- Driver of stolen truck crashes into home’s front door | www.kirotv.com
- Driver killed in horrific 90-mph crash near Kirkland apartments | KOMO News
- Protected bike lane grid pedalling into Victoria – Victoria News
National & Global News
- Bike lanes save lives AND money | Grist
- The Global Legacy of the Rails to Trails Movement – CityLab
- Get Extra Nature With This Mapping App That Guides You Down The Most Tree-Lined Route | Co.Exist | ideas + impact
- How Highway Expansionists Forced Through Funding for I-70 | Streetsblog Denver
- TIGER Act introduced in Congress | PeopleForBikes
- Divvy | Your bike sharing system in Chicago – $5 low-income membership option rolling out in Chicago! No credit card required.
- Treasure of a trail: Missouri’s Katy Trail State Park celebrates 25 years – Columbia Daily Tribune
- Calgary rolls out a downtown protected bike lane network all at once | PeopleForBikes
- When Transit Goes Down at the Polls, Here’s Some Advice on How to Regroup | Streetsblog.net
- Q&A: The League’s outgoing president on state of biking in Portland and beyond – BikePortland.org
- America Could Have Been Building Protected Bike Lanes for the Last 40 Years | Streetsblog USA – Must read. We should be a generation further on safe bike lanes in the US.
- AASHTO Journal – FHWA Says Driving Volumes Set Records for April, First Four Months of Any Year
- McDonald’s Targets Hipsters With Its Burger Bike Tote | WIRED
- U.S. Conference of Mayors Passes Vision Zero Resolution | Vision Zero Network
- Analysis: DRIVE Act | League of American Bicyclists
- Unifying Bike Advocacy: National Brotherhood of Cyclists Conference | Momentum Mag
- Google’s New Bike Plan Wants Silicon Valley to Be More Like Copenhagen – CityLab
- Dublin Unveils a Plan to Banish Cars from Its City Center by 2017 – CityLab
- The Pope’s wise advice on traffic, parking and public transit – The Washington Post
Comments
13 responses to “Bike News Roundup: ‘It’s smart to be dense’”
After trying to lock up to yet another crappy bike rack in Seattle, I was wondering if there’s any movement on trying to get municipal standards in place for acceptable bike parking designs, a la Portland. I realize that replacing all of the crappy “coat hanger” and “comb” bike racks all around the city is probably not going to happen anytime soon, but it would be nice to at least have standards in place for new installations. These don’t need to be overly wordy — they’d just need to define required spacing, setbacks/clearances, acceptable designs and materials, and some mechanism for enforcement, I would think. Anyone working on this?
Talk to Brock Howell or Bob Edmiston. They presented on this very topic at the city’s Employers Bike Summit recently.
SDOT suggested emailing [email protected] for instances where you can’t fit your bike into a city bike rack. I haven’t tried it yet.
Hi Andres, I just Sent a email to the address you posted. I said we need the uuuuu shaped bike racks, anchored in the ground, or the one I saw recently that are secure, yet have arms that fold in and out, research if you want more details, there at Evergreen College Olympia Washington. Thanks for the web site and hope my voice works and maybe yours as well once you send a email.
Mathey I totally agree with you about the crummy bike racks. We should install the more versatile uuuuu shaped bike racks. I think density in cities would help get people to bicycle ride more because of closer amenities, but we should leave some rural , peaceful areas, for people who don’t enjoy the city. We should start also putting bike racks at campsites and hiking trailheads, which i’m trying work on. Give people more care free options.
The article on Dongho Chang seems to be based more on his Twitter presence than his record. I don’t know what exactly his job responsibilities are now, but at least a few years ago I heard he had a lot of responsibilities around traffic signals. So if he’s so focused on walking and biking why are so many of our traffic signals programmed for maximum car throughput at the expense of walking, biking, and transit?
I’ll give him a pass on Fremont/39th because it’s likely enough nobody’s looked at it in 10 years and the layout of the intersection is pretty crazy. But the signals at Broad/Valley/Westlake and Broad/Roy/9th are brand new, and impose unjustifiable waits on bikes using Roy/Broad/Valley, as if the signals were programmed by rote application of standards based on traffic volume without understanding that the real bottleneck to north-south traffic flow is Mercer, or that north-south traffic is incredibly peaky and is in no danger of backing up even just an hour past peak. These are strange oversights; Mercer was the impetus for the re-build of Roy/Broad/Valley, and the north-south streets have convertible parking lanes, indicating SDOT’s awareness of peakiness. Similar stuff is common all over SLU. Then there’s the famous D-Line intersection at Mercer/Elliot. That one certainly got some attention when the D Line was starting up, and I’ve seen Dongho Chang defend the way it’s programmed, without any TSP whatsoever (not even the ability to hold the light), in person, at a public meeting.
Does Dongho Chang believe in cycling but continue to use signals in an auto-centric way? Does he believe in better signals but not have the power to get them through? Has he been moved off of work on traffic signals so he can make us happy by tweeting about biking while someone else makes sure auto capacity is prioritized where it matters? Whatever the case, it’s suspicious that a city with stated goals to improve biking, walking, and transit, and with such a visibly supportive engineer, manages to program signals to put cars first every time.
Not to let the city off the hook where it makes mistakes, but recognize that they don’t have unlimited leeway to alter signal timing, or staff to do it.
When you’ve contacted SDOT about the signal timing at Broad/Valley/Westlake and Broad/Roy/9th, what was their response?
With more than a thousand signal installations, which have to be programmed on-site, it’s safe to assume that a signal won’t be reprogrammed unless it has a record of collisions or complaints.
Even major regulatory changes take a long time to implement — the timing for pedestrian crossings changed in the 2009 MUTCD, and as of 2014, SDOT still hadn’t gotten around to updating signal timing on streets as busy as Rainier and MLK.
Social media are great for venting and collaboration, but have you asked SDOT directly about the signal timing?
I have asked about this and was given a standard blowoff response, something along the lines of, “Thank you for commenting from your unique perspective, most people commenting on traffic signals are concerned with travel speed, but we’ll take your note into consideration.” i.e. nothing indicating anyone involved actually understood these intersections.
Traffic signals are handled by a separate group. SDOT’s latest org chart (OMG WHEE NEW ORG CHART) is here: http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/docs/SDOTOrgChartsJuly2015.pdf
You can see that Dongho works on project development. His responsiveness on Twitter to problems that would otherwise be reported via FindItFixIt is something he does on the side because he’s awesome. Project development is unrelated to maintenance.
Meanwhile, under Engineering & Operations, there’s a Signal Operations group. If you report, for example, a poorly timed signal via FindItFixIt, someone from that group will respond (if you’re lucky) to tell you that they’ve updated the signal, or tell you why they can’t update it (because we have to move cars, silly).
On top of that, there are various signal positions scattered throughout the org chart. A good chunk of the supervisor positions are vacant.
That doesn’t excuse new projects with bad signal timing, of course. I wouldn’t call Mercer a “new” project, though, as it was designed years ago and has just been taking a while to implement.
Perhaps Dongho is more interested in designing walk/bike projects than signal minutiae, due to his past? After years of working in a donut shop, he probably never wants to see another donut for as long as he lives.
As a side note: SDOT needs to take a page from SPD and get better at social media. Much, much better.
I think that I shall never see
something as crappy as my soma derailleury….
ahhh
I see that you have the Seattle times article on SOV preferred commuting listed twice. For more effect? Today was especially gratifying riding past cars on I-90 and that cluster F, on 4th Ave down next to the Fire station/ emergency response center.
Oops! Fixed it.