The Seattle Department of Transportation continues outreach around its proposal to finally connect the last segment of the Duwamish Trail between the West Seattle Bridge and the separated trail that starts a half mile down West Marginal Way SW.
A Virtual Open House around all the improvements planned for the street is planned for next Thursday, February 18th at 6pm, with the fate of the protected bike lane project the most significant decision left to be made. Duwamish Valley Safe Streets and West Seattle Bike Connections have already voiced their support for connecting the trail, with the Freight Advisory Board and the Port of Seattle being the primary opponents of taking away street space for the lane.
Last week the Bicycle Advisory Board was told by SDOT’s Bradley Topol that if the proposal to convert a westernmost lane of Marginal to a two-way protected bike lane was approved, the department currently plans to separate the bike facility from the rest of Marginal with either concrete barriers or planters, not just paint and plastic posts. Prior to this, we hadn’t heard what was planned to be able to make people biking northbound, with drivers coming southbound in the next lane, more comfortable.
In advance of the virtual open house, SDOT has released an online walking tour of West Marginal that does a great job of illustrating what the improvements would entail and why they are needed. Check out the video below!
Update: due to the anticipated snow event this weekend, the closure of Lake Washington Boulevard outlined below has been postponed to Monday February 15. It will run through Sunday the 21st as planned.
A stretch of Lake Washington Boulevard just south of Mount Baker Beach will open to people walking, biking, and rolling starting this Friday February 12 Monday February 15 through Sunday February 21, Seattle Public Schools Winter Break, as well as April 9th through the 18th, for SPS Spring Break. The street will be closed to vehicles between Stan Sayres Boat Launch and Mount Baker Beach during that time.
A short segment of Lake Washington Boulevard south of Mount Baker Beach closes for Winter and Spring breaks.
This is the same stretch of Lake Washington Boulevard closed to people driving during the winter holidays last year, and doesn’t extend all the way south to Seward Park like the Summer 2020 closure did.
This closure sets the stage for another Summer-long open street on Lake Washington Boulevard but begs the question: if we can open it for a week at a time, why not indefinitely, at least for this year? People who use this route for transportation, given the lack of dedicated bike facilities parallel to it, don’t disappear at the end of school breaks.
The full Lake Washington Boulevard closure last Summer was the third-most-used Open Street in the city behind West Seattle’s Beach Drive and Green Lake Drive in North Seattle. The idea of permanently closing it to vehicle traffic, which we have done before with Interlaken Boulevard in north Capitol Hill (another Olmsted legacy route), remains hotly contested. Any path to a change in use would go through the Seattle Parks board, which has control over the street since it technically rests on park property.
In the meantime, we’ll enjoy every weeklong closure we can get.
Read more about the overall Keep Moving Street and Stay Healthy Street program here.
UPDATE (2/5): The speed bumps will be removed. This morning we received an update from SDOT’s Ethan Bergerson:
I want to give you an update that we are planning to remove this speed bump. Our City Traffic Engineer Dongho Chang personally inspected the location yesterday afternoon and, while the speed bump complied with official design standards, he felt that it was still best to remove it given the concerns we were hearing from riders because we want people to feel comfortable riding on our protected bike lanes. We’re considering other possible safety measures for this location, in addition to the safety features and signage that we have already installed.
Original post: Without any advance warning, the Seattle Department of Transportation has added “speed bumps” to the Roosevelt Way NE protected bike lane around the bus stop island near N 43rd Street. The two bumps are plastic with reflective tape on them, and come up fast on people biking. Per Dongho Chang, City Traffic Engineer, the bumps were installed in reaction to at least one bad collision between someone biking at fast speed and someone using the drop-off space here for UW Medicine.
The bike speed hump was installed in the past few days
We went out to inspect the bike speed hump after a reader tip came in overnight by reader Bob Vosper who didn’t see the bumps last night until the last second and ended up flipping over his bike. Thankfully, Bob’s okay. He sent us a photo of how the bumps look at night.
There’s an advance warning sign a bit before the sign right next to the bump, but that advance sign is a lot higher off the ground. Dongho Chang told me that’s due to MUCTD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices) standards for sign height. But it may end up out of the field of vision for someone biking down Roosevelt at night with a bike light aimed lower.
Chang was out inspecting the speed bumps today while we were checking it out, and told us they plan to replace the plastic dome with an asphalt hump like the ones more common around town. He also thought there were some immediate tweaks they could make to the approach to give people biking more warning that they’re coming up on a hazard.
More from SDOT’s Ethan Bergerson:
“We can say that this was one of several tactics intended to improve safety near the bus stop, loading zone, and main entrance to UW Medical Center a few feet down the road. People, including many hospital patients, need to cross over the bike lane in order to reach the bus stop and loading zone. In addition to being busy King County Metro bus stop, this is also the loading zone for several forms medical transportation such as King County Metro Access, DART, Hopelink Medicaid Transportation, and UW Medicine hospital shuttles.”
Bike/pedestrian collisions are a lot more rare than vehicle/pedestrian collisions, but if there was a hotspot in Seattle for crashes like this, it would be here. SDOT’s collision database shows at least 3 recorded collisions here since 2018. However, the design here looks like it makes the protected bike lane more dangerous for people biking. It seems like the best fix here would be to remove this plastic bump, which isn’t like anything currently in a PBL in the city, until another fix can be put in place.
This week SDOT told the Bicycle Advisory Board that an extension of the 4th Avenue protected bike lane downtown, to both the north and the south, is moving forward with construction planned for this Spring. With those extensions, the entire facility will be converted to a two-way bike lane compared to the current configuration which is only two-way in central downtown.
At the meeting, SDOT provided a closer look at the planned design of the lanes. To the north, the PBL will be extended from Bell to Vine Street, adding protected left turn signals to separate people riding bikes from turning drivers. We haven’t seen what the end of the bike line looks like at Vine (probably a green bike box to make a right turn onto Vine), but the northern extension as a whole should look pretty much like it does in the rest of Belltown currently.
It’s the south end where things will get a little tricky. The lane on 4th Ave is only planned to go to Dilling Way. What’s Dilling Way? It’s just north of Yesler, the curved street that connects 4th and 3rd right next to City Hall Park. SDOT is planning a two-way PBL on the north side of Dilling Way, retaining parking on the south side of the tiny street.
4th Ave will connect to the rest of the bike network via Dilling Way.
At 3rd Avenue, people riding will use a ramp to access the sidewalk to queue for the light to change. This is probably the most unfortunate element of this planned connection: routing a bike facility onto a sidewalk should be avoided at all costs. This is pretty reminiscent of the plan for the north end of the 2nd Ave PBL, except this is right in the middle of the route, not the end. SDOT said they are planning on doing some work to improve the sidewalk here, but this will particularly impact blind and low-vision pedestrians who are not expecting to be walking in a bike mixing space.
Rendering of SDOT’s planned connection between 4th Ave and 2nd Ave on Dilling Way.
Here’s a closer look at the plans for this segment, via a draft design document presented this week. You can see in the diagram that people riding bikes will use a ramp to enter and exit the 3rd and Yesler sidewalk that is separate from the ADA ramp. The crosswalk across 3rd will be completely redone to make it wider to accommodate people walking, rolling, and biking.
Plan for the protected bike lane on Dilling Way to connect across 3rd Ave and Yesler Way. (Click to enlarge)
On the block between 3rd Ave and 2nd Ave, the two-way PBL stays on the north side of the street, connecting with the 2nd Ave PBL and the Yesler stub lane currently in place on the other side of 3rd Ave. Eventually this will connect all the way to the Waterfront bike route but funding hasn’t been secured for that short connection yet.
Plan for Yesler Way’s protected bike lane between 2nd Ave and 3rd Ave. (Click to enlarge)
Why isn’t the 4th Ave PBL connecting with the already installed bike lanes in Pioneer Square on Main Street? SDOT contends that a bike lane between Yesler and Main isn’t feasible because of the volumes of buses that use the corridor. The connection is eventually planned, SDOT says, but not until 2023 or 2024, after both the Northgate and East Link light rail extensions convert more bus trips to light rail trips.
The installation of a two-way facility on most of 4th Ave this year will be a huge win, given the fact that delaying this bike lane was one of Mayor Durkan’s first acts on taking office.
Last night the oversight committee for the Move Seattle levy was told that the popular Stay Healthy Streets program will likely have to pause if the Seattle Department of Transportation doesn’t get approval to divert funding from 2.5 miles of neighborhood greenway projects that the department says it’s unlikely to be able to fully complete in the foreseeable future.
In January, the joint Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Boards voted essentially unanimously not to divert funding from existing planned bike and street improvements to fund the promise that SDOT and Mayor Jenny Durkan announced last Summer to install permanent infrastructure on twenty miles of Stay Healthy Streets.
SDOT’s Director of Project Development, Jim Curtin, told the committee that the funding source that the department had originally used to stand up and maintain Stay Healthy Streets in 2020, Federal CARES Act funding, has now run out, and that any additional funds used to support the program will be coming from Bicycle Master Plan funding.
The oversight committee did not reach a consensus on whether to approve the funding swap, asking to come back to another meeting to discuss it further. Curtin told the board that if they didn’t find a source for funding, they would have to pause planning future improvements and have to look at whether the department could continue to maintain existing Stay Healthy Streets at all.
A week after the Washington House Democrats unveiled their proposed transportation package, which would fund bike, pedestrian, and transit programs at a level never before seen from the state, the chair of the state Senate’s transportation committee, Steve Hobbs, unveiled his counterproposal last week. This package is different than the one the committee’s vice-chair Rebecca Saldaña proposed before the start of the session. The Hobbs proposal would invest billions of dollars less in multimodal transportation than the House package and billions more in statewide highway expansion.
The Senate proposal also includes a line item that shouldn’t have seen the light of day: a special sales tax increase of 1% on bicycles. This ridiculous extra bike charge would raise a grand total of 0.1% of the revenue generated by the entire package over its 16-year life. Senator Hobbs has proposed this bike tax as part of his transportation package during the last two legislative sessions as well, but there hasn’t been enough momentum to pass it in recent years and no significant counterproposal. A “symbolic” bike tax has actually been kicking around the legislature for years, including a 2013 flat $25 bike tax proposal. This bike tax would be less than that previous versions on all bikes under $2500, but the exploding e-bike market means a lot of bikes that can serve as a car replacement exist above that price point.
Currently Washington State offers a sales tax exemption on up to $25,000 on the sale of a new electric car, in addition to tax credits offered by the Federal government. This has prompted Rep. Sharon Shewmake to propose a similar sales tax exemption for e-bikes. This would add an extra cost to the purchase price of all types of bikes. This is a blow bike shops do not need right now.
The bulk of the revenue raised for the package would come from either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade proposal, both of which are being debated in other committees in the legislature right now. It would only raise the state’s gas tax by 6 cents (compared to 18 cents in the House proposal) and unlike the House proposal would not index the gas tax to keep up with inflation.
On the spending side, the package includes over $2 billion more in highway expansion projects, an amount that matches nearly exactly the reduction in multimodal transportation grants compared to the House proposal. It also invests $2 billion less in preserving and maintaining the state’s transportation infrastructure, kicking the can even further down the road and setting up more fights to secure more needed transportation funding later.
Columbia River Crossing project replacing I-5 between Washington and Oregon.
The highway expansion projects include many projects that have been on the wishlists of state legislators from all over, including $1.2 billion for the next iteration of the Columbia River Crossing, $1.4 billion for the Highway 2 trestle in Snohomish County, and dozens of other projects. While the Washington State Department of Transportation has explored prioritizing projects based on data like multimodal system development, this list comes straight from negotiations between lawmakers.
