Seattle Bike Blog

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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Scooter share permit gets committee approval + How the system would work

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

August 24, 2020

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…)

tags: city council, joel miller, sam zimbabwe, scooter share, sdot

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Saturday: The Peace Peloton rides from Madrona to Green Lake, will create a mural on the way

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

August 20, 2020
The Peace Peloton rides again Saturday, and this time riders will create a mural along the way.

The ride meets from 10 a.m. to noon at Café Soleil at 34th and Union in Madrona, where folks will work to get the mural panels ready. Shortly after noon, riders will head to a secret location to assemble the mural, then continue to Green Lake.

Elmer Dixon, Cofounder of the Seattle Chapter of the Black Panther Party, will speak at the end of the ride about “Reparations and The Need for Controlling the Institutions Within the Black Community.”

The Peace Peloton’s mission is to support Black-owned businesses and to promote economic reform for Black people.

Details from Peace Peloton:
Please join us for a rain or shine, casual, no drop, peaceful, and FUN 10 mile bike ride/demonstration . . . did I mention it’s fun?
1. Bike stage: Café Soleil, 1400 34th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
2. Time: 10:00a – 12:00p
3. Peace Peloton Mural Curation* (see below for details)
4. Bike Ride Start: 12:15p (10 miles)
5. Midway Ride: Peace Peloton Mural Assembly (confidential location)
6. Ride End: Green Lake Park, 7201 E Green Lake Dr N, Seattle, WA 98115 (Food Trucks)
7. Speaker: Elmer Dixon, Cofounder, Seattle Black Panther Chapter, Topic: “Reparations and The Need for Controlling the Institutions Within the Black Community.”
* Peace Peloton Mural
- Donate $25 to:
  - PayPal – @peacepeloton (write PP Mural in the description)
  - Venmo – @peacepeloton (write PP Mural in the description)
- Receive a blank canvas the morning of the event.
- Decorate your canvas with a message of peace, inspiration, or love to the world.
- We will stop midway along the route and artfully arrange your offering in 10ft intervals for as long as we have canvases.
To better accommodate our business partners and provide the safest and most enjoyable cycling experience for our participants please complete the R.S.V.P. and waiver.
tags: peace peloton

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Tonight: Phyllis Porter talks biking and activism

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

August 19, 2020

Tonight (August 19) at 6 p.m., log in to hear Phyllis Porter talk about “her adventures and growth as a bicycle rider and activist including her passion for safe streets for all.”

Porter has been a strong advocate and friend of Seattle Bike Blog for years. She ran for City Council in District 2 last year and has since resumed her work as an organizer and leader for safe streets.

Register for free with Bike Works to get the link. Details:

A talk from Phyllis Porter: Shero of the Seattle Black Girls Do Bike chapter, member of the Rainier Riders Cycling Club, SE Seattle resident, former Bike Works employee, volunteer, Bike Works Racial Equity Taskforce member, Rainier Valley Safe Streets activist, and former candidate for Seattle City Council will talk about her adventures and growth as a bicycle rider and activist including her passion for safe streets for all.

Wednesday, August 19th, 6 – 7 PM.

Q&A to follow presentation.

Register for a link to participate.

tags: bike works, phyllis porter

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