Mmmmm… Junebaby is so good. And Saturday’s Peace Peloton starts at the NE Seattle restaurant in the early evening, then rides to Beer Star in White Center.
Dr. Rayburn Lewis will be speaking this week, a former Cascade Bicycle Club Board member who is Chief Medical Officer at International Community Health Services.
As always, the ride is focused on supporting Black-owned businesses and promoting economic reform for Black people.
Meet at Junebaby between 4 and 6 p.m. Pre-order food from the Junebaby website (seriously, it’s so good). The ride is 14 miles with a midway stop in Centennial Park. Riders will roll into White Center around 8:30.
It will be getting dark by the end, so make sure you bring bike lights.
And hey, wanna support the cause financially while also getting a chance to win a pro’s bike? You can! $50 gets you one chance to win Tejay van Garderen’s 2019 Cannondale Supersix EVO Race bike, and their goal is to raise $25,000. More details here. (more…)
Crews are gearing up to build a protected bike lane on 4th Ave between Pine and Madison Streets downtown.
This is the start of the second north-south bike corridor downtown and a key piece of the Basic Bike Network vision, which would build a connected web of protected bike lanes from Seattle Center to the International District and places in between, helping more people bike to more homes, workplaces and destinations within our state’s busiest area.
Though 4th and 2nd Avenues look close together on a map, the topography on the ground puts them in different realms. At Pine Street, the streets are basically at the same elevation. But the two blocks separating them at Madison are some of the steepest streets in the entire city. So for people trying to access major institutions, like the Seattle Public Library or City Hall, or heading further up to First Hill, 4th and/or 5th Avenues are vital.
The first segment will be a two-way bike lane on the west side of the street between Pine and Madison, essentially mirroring 2nd Ave.
There is currently an uphill painted bike lane on 4th Ave that ends at Spring, so this project will connect to that old bike lane for the time being. That should be a huge improvement for people heading northbound who currently have to either merge into the left general purpose lane and bike in mixed traffic or try to merge across the entire street in front of the library in order to ride in the bus lane. Neither option is good. Being able to simply continue straight into a protected bike lane should be a massive improvement. (more…)
Friends, family (including her brother Cody) and community members walk in honor of McCloud in June 2016.
SDOT has installed protected bike lanes on Yesler Way between 14th and 12th Avenues, part of a project to further protect and separate the bike lanes from the First Hill Streetcar tracks in the area.
But this two-block stretch fulfills a heavy purpose: This is where Desiree McCloud was biking when she crashed and died in 2016. Video shortly before her crash showed that she was between the westbound streetcar tracks, and Desiree’s brother Cody filed a wrongful death claim against the city alleging that she crashed because of the streetcar tracks. Seattle settled the case in 2018 for $490,000, though the settlement did not include promises that the hazard would be fixed.
Streetcar tracks pose a serious hazard to biking because the gap in the road surface is just barely wide enough for a bike tire to slide into it. This often results in the tire getting wedged, throwing the person riding it to the ground with little to no warning.
Following her death, her family, friends and local safe streets advocates demanded immediate safety changes. They gathered for a memorial walk to dedicate her ghost bike and to meet with SDOT officials to talk about what the city was going to do to make sure this didn’t happen to anyone else. The meeting was an enormous gift to the city by the McCloud family, who expressed righteous anger and heartbreak over what happened and yet were still willing to show up to try to help make the city better.
So it’s great to see these bike lane changes finally happen, but it’s 2020. More than four years have passed without action. The community and Desiree’s mourning loved ones could not have been more clear about the need for immediate changes. You look at the photos, and it’s just some cheap paint and plastic posts. It’s great that they are finally in place, but the people of Seattle deserve a more urgent response from our city.
Desiree’s death was avoidable. I really hope these bike lane fixes make it so nobody ever crashes here again. But many streetcar and railroad hazards remain in our city, not to mention the overwhelming number of hazards caused by streets that prioritize car speed over safety. Fixing hazards that kill people is the very least the city can do.
A collective letter from neighborhood and regional bike and safe streets advocacy groups calls on SDOT to invest at least 1% of the West Seattle Bridge replacement budget on improving bike connections.
The city’s mode shift plan for helping people get around during the bridge closure calls for a massive increase in biking (from about 1% to 10% for commute trips). But the current plan would only fund about 10 spot improvement projects for biking at less than $100,000 each. That’s a small amount of money compared to the estimated $160-225 million project budget. And it is simply not the level of investment needed to break down the biggest infrastructure barriers that prevent more people from cycling to, from and within West Seattle.
Increasing cycling tenfold is a very difficult task, but it’s not unreasonable or wildly unprecedented. As pointed out in the letter, cycling more than doubled during the 2019 Viaduct closure and shifted more trips away from driving than the water taxi despite essentially no city infrastructure changes to help more people bike. Instead, neighbors got organized and helped each other. And this was in January, so save your bad weather excuses. Imagine what would be possible if the city also invested to make the streets safer and connect the neighborhood’s bike routes.
The ramifications from the bridge closure have also extended to Duwamish Valley neighborhoods, including Georgetown and South Park. Increased traffic has made streets more dangerous and made many of the the already poor bike route options there, many of which only offer sharrows, even worse. So investments are also needed to mitigate harm and increase bike trips in neighborhoods that now serve as detour routes.
The alternative is to not improve and fully connect bike routes, then later bemoan the fact that biking didn’t rise to meet the mode share goal. Getting a dramatic shift requires dramatic action.
West Seattle Bike Connections, Duwamish Valley Safe Streets, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and Cascade Bicycle Club all signed the letter and included a list of projects that would help improve safety and encouraging more biking. The letter: (more…)
Banning electric scooters on sidewalks seems to make sense at first. Sidewalks are for walking, right? That seemed to be the guiding principle behind Seattle’s decision to mostly leave the existing ban on riding electric scooters on sidewalks in place while launching a permit scheme to allow large numbers of shared scooters to start operating on Seattle streets.
But the city could be setting up a very serious problem, exposing scooter riders to confusing laws and creating a big new opportunity for racially biased policing. The city is effectively prepared to punish individual users for the city’s own failure to build safe streets.
As we reported yesterday, Ordinance 119867 would also amend Seattle’s city code to allow electric scooter use on sidewalks only if “there is no alternative for a motorized foot scooter to travel over a sidewalk that is part of a bicycle or pedestrian path.” The intention here is to allow sidewalk riding on key routes like over the Fremont and Montlake Bridges where there is no feasible alternative, but it’s very squishy and will be confusing in real life.
The language seems to be pulled almost word-for-word from state law and city code updates made a few years back that allowed e-bikes in bike lanes and on paths. Though most e-bikes are mostly allowed anywhere bikes are allowed, rarer and higher-speed “Class 3” e-bikes capable of assisted power beyond 20 mph are not allowed on sidewalks “unless there is no alternative to travel over a sidewalk as part of a bicycle or pedestrian path.” This language has posed confusion for Class 3 e-bike users, but the problem wasn’t massive because there are not many of those bikes around and because there is really no way for an observer (like a police officer) to know which class an e-bike belongs to without measuring its assisted top speed or seeing the regulation sticker if there is one. So Class 3 e-bike users have just sort of existed in legal limbo with very little chance of facing enforcement unless they do something obviously dangerous (contact me if you know of a case).
But electric scooters are a totally different story. They are very easy to identify and there may soon be thousands of them on the streets available for rent in addition to the growing number of people who own them. So the sloppy language here will not be a marginal problem, and the City Council and SDOT needs to carefully consider the effects of this law.
How is a regular user (or a police officer) supposed to determine when a sidewalk user has “no alternative.” Who gets to decide whether an alternative exists or whether a stretch of sidewalk is “part of a bicycle or pedestrian path?” They often look exactly the same:
These images are just a couple blocks from each other.
Yours truly took a test ride of a Lime scooter in 2018. So this has been a long time coming.
Seattle is finally maybe going to give shared scooters a try.
The City Council Utilities and Transportation Committee voted last week to approve two ordinances that would allow SDOT to launch a scooter permit program (Council bills 119867 and 119868). Councilmembers Strauss, González and Morales voted in favor, Pederson opposed. The ordinances still need to pass the full Council during the September 8 meeting.
“We’ve been having this academic conversation about the use of scooters for 18 months or longer,” Councilmember Dan Strauss, the legislation sponsor, said during the committee meeting. “I still have many concerns that need to be addressed, but we are at a point where the academic conversation has gone on long enough that if we don’t try this in the real world to see if this program does work and is appropriate for our city, we’re just going to keep circling around the same questions.”
And some of those questions are not entirely answered by the permit plan or by the Council actions, which would allow SDOT to enact their permit fee structure and would make some changes to city code regarding scooter use like allowing people to ride electric scooters in bike lane, on trails and on some stretches of sidewalk that are part of a bike route (like the Fremont Bridge for example). Oddly, this was not already the law, though people already use scooters this way. These law changes affect all electric scooter users, whether they are riding a personal scooter or a shared one.
“If we are able to allow people to learn to ride these scooters in good weather while it’s not rainy and dark, we have a higher likelihood of people being able to use these in a responsible and effective manor,” said Strauss.
Most the scooter rules will be similar to bike share rules, though scooters are currently illegal on sidewalks and the city is not looking to change that. Like the bikes, they will be limited to top speeds of 15 mph and must be parked in the furniture zone or an on-street bike corral. (more…)
Details from Seattle Parks: On scheduled weekends from May to September, a portion of Lake Washington Boulevard will be closed to motorized vehicles from 10 a.m. Saturday to 6 p.m. Sunday. “Seattle Parks and Recreation[…]
Join me for a 7 mile bike ride going from Capitol Hill into the University District at a Leisurely pace. We’ll visit various sites relevant to Seattle’s current gayborhood and gathering sites around UW.ShareMastodonTwitterFacebookRedditEmail
Details from Seattle Parks: On scheduled weekends from May to September, a portion of Lake Washington Boulevard will be closed to motorized vehicles from 10 a.m. Saturday to 6 p.m. Sunday. “Seattle Parks and Recreation[…]
Meet up in the center of the park at 7ish. Leave at 730. Every Thursday from now until forever rain or shine. Bikes, beers, illegal firepits, nachos, bottlerockets, timetraveling, lollygagging, mechanicals, good times.ShareMastodonTwitterFacebookRedditEmail
This is a repeat of my July 6 ride for those that could not make the first offering. Join me for a 5 mile bike ride around Seattle’s current gayborhood (Capitol Hill) and historic gayborhood[…]
Mmmmm… Junebaby is so good. And Saturday’s Peace Peloton starts at the NE Seattle restaurant in the early evening, then rides to Beer Star in White Center.
