Seattle Bike Blog

Bike Route Alert 9/11-14: 520 Bridge closed, including the trail

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

September 8, 2020
The 520 Bridge will be closed 11 p.m. September 11 until 5 a.m. September 14 for a series of major construction projects. These closures include the trail over the lake.

The trail under the bridge on the Montlake side connecting Shelby/Hamlin to Lake Washington Blvd will be open during the daytime, but will close at night.

Details from WSDOT:
Reminder to travelers: SR 520 will completely close for construction between Seattle and the Eastside from 11 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11, to 5 a.m. Monday, Sept. 14. During that weekend, crews will repair a damaged sign bridge that goes over all lanes of SR 520, realign Montlake’s eastbound SR 520 on-ramps, restripe a section of the westbound lanes, and more. Check out our latest video to learn more.

What travelers should expect:
- All east- and westbound lanes will be closed between Montlake Boulevard and 92nd Avenue Northeast near Medina.
- The SR 520 Trail will be closed across Lake Washington.
- The temporary path under SR 520 between East Montlake Park and Lake Washington Boulevard will be open during the daytime, with flaggers present, so please use caution. This path will close at night.
- SR 520 will remain open between I-5 and Montlake Boulevard.
tags: 520 trail, Bike Route Alert, wsdot

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Saturday: Peace Peloton rides from NE Seattle to White Center + Fundraiser

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

September 3, 2020

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…)

tags: peace peloton, rayburn lewis

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Construction begins soon on initial segment of the 4th Ave bike lane

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

September 2, 2020

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…)

tags: 4th ave, basic bike network, sdot

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Seattle finally builds protected bike lane on stretch of Yesler where Desiree McCloud died in 2016

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

September 1, 2020

New pbl revisions on Yesler pic.twitter.com/nADh4npo2N

— Dongho Chang (@dongho_chang) August 30, 2020

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.

tags: cody mccloud, desiree mccloud, first hill streetcar, sdot, yesler

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Letter: Invest 1% of West Seattle Bridge budget to help meet biking goals

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

August 28, 2020

Read the full letter (PDF)

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…)

tags: cascade bicycle club, duwamish valley safe streets, seattle neighborhood greenways, upper west seattle bridge, west seattle, west seattle bike connections

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Seattle’s proposed scooter rules set riders up for failure

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

August 26, 2020

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.

(more…)

tags: jenny durkan, lorena gonzález, scooter share, tammy morales

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