Seattle Bike Blog

Thursday: Join Seattle Neighborhood Greenways’ Streets For People celebration and fundraiser

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

November 17, 2020

Our city is very lucky to have Seattle Neighborhood Greenways working to promote equitable, safe and fun streets. The organization’s paid staff and its many volunteers do an enormous amount of work, much of which the general public never sees. They are always going around town planting seeds and forming partnerships that turn into innovative ideas and strong coalitions.

You can be a part of their work by volunteering and by supporting them financially. Their second annual Streets for People celebration and fundraiser is Thursday. Register your virtual table to get access to the program and support their work.

Details from Seattle Neighborhood Greenways:

It’s our 2nd Annual Community Celebration and Fundraiser for Seattle Neighborhood Greenways

Thursday, November 19th, 2020 from 6-7:15pm

And you’re invited!

Join us for an inspiring evening of community, celebration, and connection.

This year we’ll join together online, and celebrate the street spaces that have helped our families, communities, and local restaurants make it through a challenging year.

Help us pay tribute to the amazing grassroots activism that brought us Stay Healthy Streets, Cafe Streets, and Whose Streets? Our Streets!, projects this year. We’ll feature community voices, fantastic videos, safe streets trivia prizes, opportunities to visit with friends and make new connections, and so much more.

We’ll celebrate the mission of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways that let’s us re-imagine our public spaces in a way that puts people first. All of our fundraising this night will go directly towards keeping this critical work moving forward.

TICKETS: Click here!

FACEBOOK: Share the word with your friends!

tags: seattle neighborhood greenways, streets for people 2020

— Advertisement —
Watch: Person driving injures a biking Real Change vendor, then SPD mocks and blames the victim

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

November 13, 2020

This video, posted by Real Change, is enraging. Using body cam footage, the newspaper and Black Fuji Studios pieced together key moments that reveal what appears to be an extremely biased March 2019 investigation by officers who responded to a call for help. I have not reviewed any extra footage, so I can’t report on anything beyond what’s in this Real Change video. But it’s pretty damning.

Witnesses, who happen to be Department of Corrections officers, tell responding SPD officers that the person driving was likely at fault and continued driving even after hitting the man biking on a Sodo street. It’s difficult to piece together the exact circumstances of the collision from the video, though witnesses say the man driving was going fast and should have seen the person on the bike.

But then SPD Officers Hagan, Pitzner and Gore mocked and laughed at the victim because he appeared homeless and tried to find reasons to give the injured man citations. The officers then let the man drive home without a citation. The injured man had to undergo knee surgery and had a fractured rib, injuries the responding officers seemed to find very funny.

“Is he gonna make it?” asked Officer Gore while the man was still in pain on the ground next to them. Gore and several other officers laughed. Is the joke that he’s in pain but not dying? How is that funny?

The officers then joke about wanting to see the video because “it was a good hit,” as one witness put it. This was also considered funny.

Officer Pitzner decided that the injured man needed to be cited for biking without a helmet. Helmet use is required in Seattle, but helmets never cause or prevent collisions. It is irrelevant to finding fault in a collision investigation.

Officer Pitzner then tried to pin a felony theft charge on the injured man by trying to figure out if he stole the Lime e-assist bike he was riding. The officer said the e-bike is worth $2,000, making it a felony if it is stolen. He asked another officer to search the injured man’s phone to see if he unlocked the bike legitimately. Investigating someone for theft based on how they look is a pretty clear case of baised policing. There seems to be no indication that the bike is stolen, and one of the other officers even notes that because the lights are on, it was unlocked properly. These Lime-E bikes must be switched on using the app before the lights and battery-powered motor will function. Simply cutting the lock will not switch them on. But even if it were stolen, theft of a bike is not a contributing factor to a collision.

But most of all, this video shows how stacked the deck is against people who appear to be experiencing homelessness. This person was injured while biking in a part of the city that is lacking safe bike infrastructure, then the responding officers did what they could to not only pin the whole thing on him, but also find more irrelevant charges to tack on.

What you see in this video isn’t justice, and it isn’t public safety.

tags: real change, spd

— Advertisement —
Yeah, there was no need to be worried about Seattle voting for transit

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

November 10, 2020

Transit is extremely popular in Seattle.

More than 80 percent of voters approved Prop 1, which would expand the sales tax to fund bus transit service hours, infrastructure improvements and access programs in Seattle. And considering 9 in 10 registered voters weighed in on this election, that’s a pretty epic mandate from the people of our city.

Congratulations to Transportation Choices Coalition and everyone who worked on the Yes For Transit campaign.

There should never again be any consternation about a transit improvement project or question about whether the public would support a significant change to a roadway in order to improve transit service and reliability.

The result is also frustrating in a way because it makes clear that a far more ambitious transit package would have easily passed. A King County measure would also have passed, but County leaders declined to run one.

But because the state legislature failed to legalize other taxing options for local transportation benefit districts and the WA Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of I-976 (it was ruled unconstitutional well after the deadline to submit a proposition to voters), Seattle had to go with a proposition that cut the vehicle license fee and relied on a regressive sales tax. And though the City Council could have sought a full 0.2% sales tax, they instead decided to raise the Mayor’s proposed 0.1% tax to 0.15%. Think about that for a second. Mayor Jenny Durkan wanted a smaller version of a transit measure that 80% of voters ended up approving, with her office calling her smaller proposal “fiscally prudent” in an SDOT Blog post back in July:

At a time of great economic challenge, the new Transportation Benefit District package proposed today aims to both right-size our transit investment to be fiscally prudent on our path to economic recovery, while doing our best to protect the all-day transit service that is essential to building back stronger than ever before.

“Right-size.” Cutting transit is not the “right size” for meeting our growing city’s climate, mobility and equity goals. Times got hard, so Mayor Durkan wanted to retreat. But the people of Seattle were like, “Hell no don’t run, let’s fix this problem.” Voters would have gone for much more if given the chance. Mayor Durkan is hopelessly out of touch with this city, and I’m glad the Council was there to increase her proposal. (more…)

tags: 2020 general election, 2021 primary, jenny durkan, joe biden, transportation benefits district, transportation choices coalition, yes for transit

— Advertisement —
Support the MASS Coalition’s efforts to ease the pain from the 2021-22 Seattle transportation budget

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

November 2, 2020
Both Cascade Bicycle Club and the larger MASS Coalition (including Seattle Neighborhood Greenways ~~and Transporation Choices Coalition~~ among others) they are part of have action alerts out right now asking supporters to call on city leaders to limit the huge cuts in walking, biking and transit funding Mayor Jenny Durkan proposed in her 2021-22 budget. (Correction: This post erroneously said TCC is a member of the MASS Coalition. While TCC has partnered with MASS and its members in the past, they are not a member.)

Specifically, the Move All Seattle Sustainably (“MASS”) Coalition is backing the “Solidarity Budget” led by a long list of community organizations and is specifically pushing for a list of transportation budget amendments (PDF):
- Upgrade Rainier Avenue sidewalks in Southeast Seattle ($1 million)
- Continue work on the Georgetown-to-South Park Trail ($1.8 million)
- Cancel cuts to the Route 44 Multimodal Project connecting Ballard to the U-district via Phinney Ridge and Wallingford ($1 million)
- Advance planning and early design for bike network connections in South Seattle, specifically a route through the Rainier Valley (along MLK Way) and a connection between Georgetown and Downtown, via SoDo ($400,000).
The mayor’s budget levies heavier cuts to walking, biking and transit than to car-centric budget lines. Perhaps the most egregious is an increase in the so-called “Intelligent Transportation System,” investments that do nothing to help people get around outside of a car and can even make conditions for walking and biking worse. Just look at the disaster that is Mercer Street.

Safe streets projects in Seattle have been huge successes. ITS projects have been either useless or actively bad. Why would we invest in repeating our failures while slashing the budgets for our successes?

Worse, when Seattle voters passed the Move Seattle Levy in 2015, they did so based on big promises about investing in walking, biking and transit. But the city front-loaded the car-centric projects, and now the walking, biking and transit projects are exposed to budget cuts. If they don’t get funded before the levy expires, projects will fall off the end of the list. The city needs to dedicate itself to the vision voters approved and deliver big improvements for walking, biking and transit.

So while the budget is certainly going to be tighter than in previous years, cuts should obviously come from car-centric programs that don’t help us meet our climate, traffic safety and equity goals. And pointless freeway-style electronic signs are a great and very easy place to start. (more…)
tags: 2021 budget, cascade bicycle club, move all seattle sustainably, seattle neighborhood greenways

— Advertisement —
The Seattle Pedaling Relief Project will bike your ballot to a drop box

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

November 2, 2020

From the Seattle Pedaling Relief Project.

The Seattle Pedaling Relief Project has been organizing volunteer efforts to deliver food and necessities from food banks to community members for months. Now they want to help people get their ballots to the ballot box.

If you need assistance getting your ballot delivered for any reason, fill out this form online. If you want to help deliver, fill out this form. Delivery teams will consist of at least two volunteers.

Looking for voting advice? Check out these endorsements from local transportation organizations.

More details on the ballot delivery effort from the Seattle Pedaling Relief Project:

Do you know of any late voters who would like help transporting their ballot to a ballot box?

The Seattle Pedaling Relief Project is a group of volunteer bike riders who have been gathering since the beginning of the pandemic to deliver groceries from food banks to neighbors in need. With over 260 volunteers, we work with 5 food banks and multiple community gardens and little free pantries. We are grateful that in Washington we can mail in our ballots and we want to be a resource for those who want to be sure their ballots get counted in time for the election.

On Nov 1 and Nov 3 we will have groups of riders (at least 2 or more in each group) ready to pick up ballots anywhere in the Seattle/ King County area and deliver them to the nearest ballot box. Anyone who would like their ballot picked up can fill out this form. The riders who will be picking up the ballots will be coordinating with the ballot-givers directly for address details. We encourage folx to keep their ballot tab to track that their ballot has been counted.

If you are interested in volunteering to pick-up ballots from your friends, family, and neighbors and then bike them down to your local ballot box please fill out this form or visit the Bike the Ballot page on the Seattle Pedaling Relief Project website!

Thank you so much for your time and please promote this to anyone and everyone who could use this service.

Let’s go practice some democracy!

tags: seattle pedaling relief project

— Advertisement —
Halloween Peace Peloton starts in Wallingford and includes fundraising costume contest

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

October 28, 2020

Celebrate Halloween in the Peace Peloton Saturday.

The ride stages at Wallingford Playfield at noon for some food from the excellent Pam’s Kitchen, then leaves at 2 p.m. for a 12-mile ride to Gas Works Park via Discovery Park.

The “Hunter’s Moon Halloweekend Fun-Raisier” ride ends with a fund-raising costume contest at Gas Works. For more details and info on how to donate, go to peacepeloton.com.

tags: black lives matter, peace peloton, wallingford

— Advertisement —