It’s midnight, and you’re biking home from a night out. Should you ride on the separated biking and walking path or along the side of the nearby state highway? If you think the answer is obvious, then congratulations! You’re a lawbreaker.

King County Trails are only open from dawn until dusk. We can debate whether any park should close at dusk, but regional trails are important transportation infrastructure. It makes no more sense to close a trail at night than it does a road or highway. People travel at all hours, so our safest biking and walking routes need to be open at all hours.

The good news is that King County is currently considering changes to the time of day restrictions on trails, and they are collecting feedback through an online survey. Go fill it out, and tell them that trails should be open 24 hours.

The reality is that this is not a real rule, and everybody knows it. I have never heard of anyone getting in trouble solely for biking on a King County trail after dusk. But that’s also a problem. Having a rule on the books that essentially everybody ignores gives law enforcement wide discretion about who they stop. Other similar laws, such as King County’s old bicycle helmet law, have been misused to profile people based on race or homelessness status. This is a big reason why the King County Board of Health repealed the helmet law in 2022.

The King County Council in June tasked the Parks Department with conducting a “feasibility assessment” for extending trail hours and reporting back with the results by February. The current survey will surely be part of that assessment. The Council also gave the Parks Director the power to extend trail hours on a trail-by-trail basis without the need for further Council action. They also allowed Parks to keep trails open even if they pass through parks that are otherwise closed. So everything is set up for Parks to take action and change these trail rules.

It should be 100% legal to bike or walk on the safest route regardless of the time of day. Period. There is no wiggle room here.

Though King County Parks are not in control of trails within the Seattle city limits, Seattle isn’t off the hook here, either. According to the Seattle Parks website, Seattle’s official open hours for the Burke-Gilman Trail are the same as the rest of the city’s parks (SMC 18.12.245): 4 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. I am not sure if these hours pertain to sections of the trail under the jurisdiction of SDOT or the University of Washington, however. Seattle’s hours are slightly more lenient than King County Parks, but they are not good enough. The Seattle code setting trail hours includes exemptions for park boulevards, which seems to acknowledge that transportation facilities should not close at night. So why close trails then?

We need our whole region to agree together that trail are open 24 hours regardless of which agency is in charge or which section. It’s absurd that someone might be biking along a trail and suddenly become a scofflaw because they crossed a city limit line after 11:30 p.m.

Seattle’s rules, which include many hours of darkness, make absolutely no sense. If a trail is safe to use at 4 a.m., then it is just as safe at 3 a.m. King County might be able to claim that their trails are not designed to be safe for use in the dark, and so “closing” them might shield them from liability if someone were to, for example, crash on an unmaintained bump in the trail surface that was difficult to see at night. But people are already using them at night, so the county should already be maintaining them to be safe after the sun goes down. Simply keeping a rule on the books that few people even know about is not a good solution.