The Northgate biking and walking bridge is an enormous undertaking. I-5 in this part of town is level with or even above street level, so the bridge needs to climb in order to get above and over the massive freeway. But it’s needed if Northgate Station is going to be able to reach people on the west side of the freeway.
Crews have been closing the I-5 Express Lanes for several days of intense work in recent weeks to install large structural elements that were constructed off-site.
The project is still aiming for completion in fall 2021 in time for the opening of Northgate Station. A lot of things have had to come together to meet this deadline, and it’s great to see that goal seemingly within reach. It had to gather funding from the Move Seattle Levy, Sound Transit and the Washington State legislature in order to become reality.
It’s also becoming a symbol, at least for me, of a better future once COVID is finally behind us. Knowing that more Link stations are coming online later this year and that this bridge should be ready to greet the first passengers is really inspiring to me after such a dismal year. We still have more time in COVID protocols (especially us parents), but there is promise on the other side. Because of projects like this, which people worked so hard for in the last decade, our city will open up this decade in ways it never did before COVID arrived.
And for as much criticism as I send to Mayor Jenny Durkan, it is really cool that when this opens students will be able to use it to access two years of free tuition at North Seattle College thanks to her Seattle Promise program.
This bridge is going to need a better name. “Northgate Pedestrian and Bicycle Bridge” is way too long. I usually just call it the “Northgate Bridge,” but that maybe isn’t great because there is already a nearby I-5 bridge over Northgate Way. Maybe “Northgate Station Bridge?” Anyone have any other suggestions?
Here’s a video with some cool flyover footage of the area: (more…)
Friend of Seattle Bike Blog Marley Blonsky stars in the new mini-documentary All Bodies on Bikes alongside Kailey Kornhauser. The 13-minute film premiered today, so check it out above.
The film follows them on a bike camping trip and other bike adventures while they discuss their relationships with their bodies and society’s harmful associations with weight and body size.
Marley has been a longtime friend of the site and was the last in-person guest from outside my household to join the Bike News Roundup chat before the 2020 COVID shutdown. Not only has she been a strong voice for helping more fat people feel welcome on a bike, she also works hard to improve the bike industry’s offerings for people with larger bodies. So it’s great to see Shimano featuring her in their video series, hopefully a sign of changes to come from more companies.
Also, Marley is going to teach a two-part bike camping class online in April. You can learn more and register here. Not only is the class a way for the bike-camping-curious to learn more, but Marley will also offer suggestions one-on-one if you have questions about your gear or bike set-up. Suggested $30-$50 per person.
From Seattle Congestion Pricing Study Summary Report (PDF)
As Mayor Jenny Durkan’s frustrating and damaging time in office gets slowly closer to ending, it’s important that Seattle understands the ways her leadership (or lack thereof) harmed our city and many of its genuine movements for change. Because we cannot afford to elect another mayor like Durkan. So let’s look at her congestion pricing plan as one good illustration of many of the ways her leadership style is ineffective at best and harmful at worst.
In April 2018, Seattle’s new mayor Jenny Durkan made headlines by announcing that by the end of her first term (this year) she would launch a congestion pricing scheme to toll motor vehicles entering downtown. The announcement certainly turned heads, but not for the right reasons.
Congestion pricing can be a very effective tool to reduce driving while also raising funds to improve other transportation options like transit, walking and biking. Durkan’s tolling plan hoped to reduce the city’s total carbon emissions by 9% to 20%, and it was the centerpiece of her climate plan. Congestion pricing can be a very effective policy, and a handful of European cities and Singapore have enacted versions of the concept successfully. Durkan wanted Seattle to be the first city in the U.S. to do it.
The problem is that nobody was asking for it. I don’t mean that nobody in Seattle thinks it’s a good idea or has dreamed up concepts. Congestion pricing is one of those ideas that could be great, but it’s an enormous political undertaking. You have to pick your battles, and very few if any community organizations, including safe streets and environmental justice organizations, had been specifically advocating for congestion pricing. They hadn’t been doing all the community-building work that they know is necessary for a major idea like this to have community buy-in. There are a lot of questions about the potential inequities with such tolls, for example, so people and organizations that take equity seriously are not going to just jump on board with a plan they know nothing about just because the mayor announced it.
But to make matters worse, Mayor Durkan was quickly losing community trust. At the same time she was announcing her congestion pricing plan, she was delaying or cancelling many of the projects that people and organizations were actually asking for. In 2018, Mayor Durkan essentially cancelled Seattle’s bike lane program, for example. She built just 4% of the bike lanes planned for that year. I remember someone (I honestly don’t remember who) saying that complaints about delayed bike lanes were “thinking too small” because Durkan was going to do congestion pricing. But if she won’t even paint a bike lane, what on Earth made anyone think she would toll every motor vehicle entering downtown?
So it is absolutely no surprise to learn that her congestion pricing plan is officially dead. Of course it is. I personally never believed she was serious. It seemed like she just wanted to stand out to Mike Bloomberg, a plan that worked because he soon visited town and they went on a media tour together. Bloomberg was a proponent of congestion pricing in New York City in his time as mayor and had launched the American Cities Climate Challenge. Seattle “won” his challenge in 2018 in part by planning for congestion pricing. This does not feel like a coincidence.
Mayor Durkan cared more about what Michael Bloomberg wanted than what community organizations in her own city wanted.
People quickly realized that even if they support the concept of congestion pricing, Durkan was absolutely the wrong person to lead such a delicate program that needed a strong equity focus.
What’s frustrating is that congestion pricing could be good for Seattle. We need big and bold ideas to address big problems like climate change, improving transit, increasing equitable mobility, and making streets safer. But I worry that the idea of congestion pricing is now poisoned because people had to organize against Durkan’s half-assed, non-serious proposal.
“Multiple members, including ourselves, voiced concerns of the regressivity of congestion pricing towards workers, especially those who have been displaced and have to drive into downtown Seattle for work,” Jill Mangaliman told KUOW. Mangaliman is the executive director of Got Green, an important environmental justice organization in our community and the exact kind of organization we would want helping to craft such an effort. “Those from the [environmental justice] communities were in favor of having a more comprehensive transit system and progressive funding sources, instead of being punitive towards workers and communities priced out of the city.”
I don’t blame Got Green for having this response given Durkan’s track record on anti-poor policies like her cruel treatment of people living in encampments. But it sucks that now congestion pricing is considered “punitive towards workers and communities out of the city.” It doesn’t need to be that way, but Durkan sure wasn’t making a good case otherwise.
As the number of people running for mayor continues to grow, hopefully Seattle’s community organizations and candidates can all learn from Durkan’s mistakes here. She did not earn community trust before asking them to go out on a limb for her. She displayed a disdain or disinterest in their existing priorities, then proposed a major idea that relied heavily on their enthusiastic support in order to succeed. It was a failure of leadership from beginning to end, and I just hope that the lesson Seattle takes away from this is more about Durkan’s leadership than the promising idea that she dragged down with her.
Last week, five years after Capitol Hill’s light rail station opened, the construction fencing was finally removed on the long-planned public plaza that will complement the south entrance of the station next to Cal Anderson Park. It’s a truly great new gathering space for a neighborhood that’s always been short on park land, and it’s very much like an extension of Cal Anderson Park just opened.
But the new public space was overshadowed: the plaza’s opening highlighted the fact that the redesigned stretch of Denny Way in front of the station is not functioning as it should. Despite the fact that this segment of street was closed for six years to construct the light rail station, it’s back to being a regular part of the street grid, albiet only one-way. And nothing was installed to prevent drivers from entering the public plaza, much less the pedestrian-oriented areas of the street itself.
Brie Gyncild is one of the driving forces in the Capitol Hill Champion volunteer group, a joint project of the Capitol Hill Community Council and the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce that was devoted to achieving community goals for the development of the light rail station site. “Originally, the community vision was for that street to be a pedestrian-first street”, she told me. A permanent closure of the space to vehicles wasn’t ever on the table, but the design of the street was supposed to ensure that any vehicle traffic would be going very slow.
Indeed, the 2011 Urban Design Framework for Capitol Hill Station outline how the goals for the Denny Way festival street should include being “pedestrian and bicycle focused”, and having “limited access for local circulation and commercial load zones”. An illustration of the festival street concept from the same framework includes a notation to “consider planters and removable bollards to limit vehicle access”. In 2016 when the station opened, SDOT closed down the street when the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) was in town, for games of Scrabble, but almost exclusively in the years since the station opened Denny Way has been open to vehicle traffic. A festival street designation is not the same thing as a festival street design.
2011 Design Framework for the Denny Way festival street in Capitol Hill (Click to enlarge)
Central Capitol Hill, almost certainly with the help of the light rail station itself, has seen a remarkable 31% drop in the number of cars per resident in the past 10 years, per the Seattle Times. Here’s an instance where going the extra mile to make a block pedestrian and bicycle oriented will not cost us very much compared to any other option, and could have a reverberating effect throughout the neighborhood. Denny Way has long been envisioned as the location of a neighborhood greenway in a dense neighborhood with few east-west bike routes planned. Yet the greenway project has been delayed numerous times. In the center of the planned bike network for the area, vehicle access remains the priority.
Central Capitol Hill as envisioned in the 2014 Bicycle Master Plan. Denny and Broadway rests at the center of the planned network. (Click to enlarge)
Denny Way is only one example, but there are countless other examples of prioritizing access for a limited few and sacrificing the benefits that could come from turning space for cars into space for people. The renderings of Pike and Pine Street between 1st and 2nd Aves planned as part of the Pike Pine Renaissance show another “shared street” with people walking across the roadway freely but without any barricades to prevent drivers from speeding through the space. We know if this was converted into another Occidental Avenue, with business and emergency access preserved, that it would become a beloved public space. And yet we won’t do it.
Concept drawing for Pike Street between 1st and 2nd Ave as part of the Pike Pine Renaissance Project.
In West Seattle, plans are moving forward for a pair of twin apartment buildings on a designated bike corridor, 36th Ave SW south of Fauntleroy. It’s not a major arterial, and yet the street concept that goes before the design review board in coordination with SDOT includes 20 feet of roadway space, and 23 feet of parking, including back-angle parking. The bike facility proposed as Seattle careens toward 2030 completely off track to hit its carbon reduction targets is…sharrows. Even the Southwest Design Review board is trying to push back on that, with its meeting report noting,”The Board noted the street improvements would still create a car centric street, with parking on both sides of the street and wide car travel lanes.”
Street concept plan for 4406 36th Ave SW. (Click to enlarge)
The city’s new report outlining its ambitious transportation electrification goals generated headlines. Seattle has an entire department in Seattle City Light that is very invested in supporting the transition to more broad availability of electric vehicle infrastructure. But when it comes to making decisions that will support the necessity of the city as a whole to reduce the amount of vehicle miles that Seattle residents travel, on an institutional level Seattle is still sticking with the status quo.
Just before 5pm Wednesday evening, someone riding a bike was struck and killed by the driver of a semi-truck in the Georgetown neighborhood, according to the Seattle Police Department. The collision took place at the intersection of Corson Ave S and S Michigan Street, which turns into S Bailey Street east of Corson. From SPD:
Prior to the collision, the driver of the semi-truck was stopped facing northbound at the intersection of South Michigan Street and Corson Avenue South, preparing to make an eastbound right turn [onto Bailey Street]. As the driver waited at the light, a bicyclist that had also been travelling [sic] northbound pulled in front of the truck, apparently out of view of the driver. When the truck pulled forward to turn right, the bicyclist was struck and killed.
The person riding the bike was approximately 40 years old, according to the department.
The curb ramp from Corson onto Bailey has a very large apron to accommodate the wide turning radius of large freight trucks that travel through the area. Georgetown has received a much larger volume of vehicle traffic since last March when the high West Seattle Bridge was entirely closed, though the low bridge remains open to freight traffic. The semi truck on SDOT’s traffic camera showed a visible USPS logo. There is a USPS distribution facility not far from Georgetown in Tukwila, and a USPS vehicle maintenance facility in SoDo.
Corson Ave S and S Bailey St (Google Maps)
Collision at Corson Ave S and S Bailey St. All EB lanes are closed. Use alternate routes. pic.twitter.com/xukxQd2eh2
