The Green River Trail is closed on the south side of the Duwamish River between Tuwila International Boulevard and E Marginal Way S until November 30. The City of Tukwila is working to daylight Riverton Creek, “which has been flowing through a pipe for roughly 50 years,” according to Tukwila.
The detour follows S 112th St and E Marginal Way S, which both have painted bike lanes most of the way. The only potential tricky part is turning left from Marginal to 112th when headed north, where the is no traffic signal. There is a center turn lane.
But the work sounds great, daylighting the creek as part of an effort to restore it and its coho salmon runs. There will also be new public art when the trail reopens.
The city’s trail design would realign the railroad tracks. A court decision says the Feds have jurisdiction over such a decision.
Appellants fighting the city’s decades-long plan to finally complete the Ballard Missing Link of the Burke-Gilman Trail have successfully found another legal maneuver to further delay the needed safety project until 2022, the Seattle Times reports.
A King County Court has decided (PDF) that Seattle cannot redesign the railroad tracks along Shilshole Ave NW and NW 45th Street without first getting approval from the Federal Surface Transportation Board. Though the city’s planned trail route would not remove the mostly-abandoned (but still technically operational) railroad tracks, there are points in the current trail design where tracks would be realigned to make crossings work better. These rebuilt sections of track would be funded by the city, which owns the tracks, not the Ballard Terminal Railroad. The issue isn’t that there’s anything wrong with the city’s plan, just that they need another approval. And every new process opens more opportunities to find more technicalities to further delay the project.
This design was the result of a much-lauded “compromise” between many industrial leaders and trail supporters. Now details of that compromise has been used against the city to further delay the project. Every time the Missing Link comes up for debate again, people say, “Let’s just get trail supporters and opponents together at the same table and work out a deal.” So much for that.
Former Councilmember Mike O’Brien, a longtime trail supporter, and Warren Aakervik, the retired owner of Ballard Oil, shook hands during a 2017 press conference announcing a compromise deal.
The City of Seattle will appeal the decision, saying it “could have concerning broader implications for public safety,” according to a statement (see full statement below). Cascade Bicycle Club, which has long championed the trail and legally intervened on the city’s behalf, put out a statement that the decision does not alter the fate of the project, but does add delay: (more…)
Maxwell Burton and Michael Lang had started organizing the 2020 Disaster Relief Trials, a cargo-hauling bike competition, when the COVID-19 outbreak hit. As soon as schools closed down in the spring, Lang and Burton realized their mission had just changed.
The Disaster Relief Trials (“DRT”) is “a trial competition that’s meant to simulate a natural disaster happening in an area,” said Burton in a recent interview for Seattle Bike Blog TV (SBBTV). During a disaster, “bikes, and especially cargo bikes, are going to be the most flexible way to transport needed goods and medical supplies and water and other things around.”
Seattle has held DRTs several times over the past decade, usually organized by Familybike Seattle. It’s a ton of fun, but it’s also very informative. Teams or individuals bike around the city completing various tasks, from hauling water or “medicine” (usually an egg that you need to deliver unbroken) to demonstrating that you can fix a flat tire or carry your bike over a blocked path. It also connects different community-led and public disaster preparedness efforts, and it gets participants to think about their own personal disaster planning (or, commonly, the lack thereof).
But when schools and businesses closed and people hunkered down to prevent the spread of this scary respiratory disease, Lang and Burton knew that the crisis all the previous DRTs were practicing for had just arrived.
“This isn’t a trials anymore,” said Burton. “This is no longer a Disaster Relief Trials. This is disaster relief.”
So they threw out all their planning notes for the event and created the Seattle Pedaling Relief Project (“SPRP”), an all-volunteer effort designed to help food banks and other community organizations with the huge logistical challenge of getting resources to people who need them. One of the unexpected challenges of a pandemic is that many of the most vulnerable people in the community can no longer safely or comfortably access services like food banks the way they used to. Meanwhile, the need for services like food banks has increased as people have lost work.
The SPRP forms relationships with service providers and organizes volunteer opportunities for people with bikes to help make deliveries. (more…)
Mayor Jenny Durkan has failed in her basic duty to protest the people of Seattle from a police force under her control. She has lost the confidence of the people, and continues to demonstrate that she is not the leader the city needs right now. A veto-proof majority of City Councilmembers (7 out of 9) has already taken action to make big governing decisions without her, a nearly unprecedented show of the Council’s lack of confidence in her leadership. And with news that a citizen-led recall effort has just cleared a major legal hurdle, it is even harder to justify why she remains in office.
Seattle Bike Blog called for her to resign a month ago, and her actions since then have not changed that stance.
The veto-proof Council block has already passed a progressive “boss tax” to help address budget shortfalls due to COVID and longstanding needs for affordability programs despite her lack of support. And now that veto-proof majority appears ready to cut the Seattle Police budget in half in response to the very clear demands of a huge, Black-led popular movement for justice and against police brutality. Mayor Durkan, on the other hand, spent eight days attacking the protest movement with explosives, chemicals and other forms of police violence. Those actions, particularly the mass use of respiratory irritants in the midst of a respiratory virus pandemic, are the core of the recall complaint against her.
But beyond that malfeasance, her actions make her uniquely unsuited to do the work facing the city right now. Seattle needs to close a massive budget hole, and reducing the extremely bloated SPD budget and funding alternatives to policing are going to be part of it. This is extremely difficult work, and it’s going to take a huge amount of research and outreach to get it done. And it’s going to involve working closely with many of the community leaders the mayor gassed for eight days. It’s not clear how she can restore the trust that went up in smoke along with the discharge from police weapons downtown and on Pine Street. We also need a mayor who will work with the overwhelming Council majority rather than fighting them every step of the way, making this huge task so much harder than it already is.
Governing by veto-proof Council majority is absurd and inefficient. Seattle’s government wasn’t set up for this. Rather, the assumption is that once a mayor has lost this much Council support, she would leave or be removed from office. If she won’t resign, then she is forcing people to do it for her either through a Council action or a recall.
From Google Maps, which does not yet automatically recognize the route as of press time.
Seattle is only one block away from completing a connected bike route through downtown from the International District to Fremont and the Burke-Gilman Trail.
This project has been the result of so much work by so many people (too many to name, but obviously Cascade Bicycle Club, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and individual advocates like so many of you). Years and years of advocacy and passing funding measures have led to this point. Sure, it’s taken a lot longer than originally hoped, and sure there will still be some incomplete details due to budget cuts and construction zones. But it’s almost finally here.
The key to connecting the 2nd Ave bike lane to the temporary 9th Ave bike lanes is making Bell Street a two-way street for people biking. For years, people have had to bike in mixed traffic on Blanchard Street, but not any more. By designating Bell Street Park a “Stay Healthy Street” between 1st and 5th Avenues, car traffic has been limited and people can bike both directions.
Meanwhile, SDOT crews have poured curbs to create a two-way bike lane on the north side of the street from 5th to 6th and 7th to Denny/9th. That leaves only the single block between 6th and 7th Avenues missing from a complete bike route that seemed like a dream a decade ago when I started writing Seattle Bike Blog. (more…)
Mmmmm. Island Soul. People don’t usually come to Seattle Bike Blog for restaurant reviews, but Island Soul is just so good.
The Peace Peloton rides Saturday from Amy’s Merkato Ethiopian & Eritrean Restaurant in Hillman City and Deli to Island Soul in Columbia City, traveling to the Central District and other neighborhoods along the way.
Led by Doc Wilson of InGaj, the Peace Peloton rides to demonstrate support for Black-owned businesses and promote economic reform for Black people.
The Green River Trail is closed on the south side of the Duwamish River between Tuwila International Boulevard and E Marginal Way S until November 30. The City of Tukwila is working to daylight Riverton Creek, “which has been flowing through a pipe for roughly 50 years,” according to Tukwila.
