The ceremonial unlocking of the first LimeBike July 27, 2017 in Seattle.
Lime announced today that they will be pulling their e-bikes from Seattle streets December 31.
This follows a week and a half of rumors that the company was shutting down, rumors the company denied to both Seattle Bike Blog and The Urbanist. As recently as December 15, a company spokesperson told Seattle Bike Blog that Lime would remain in operation until at least March, around the time when the long-awaited scooter pilot is due to be rolled out.
But an email to users on Christmas Eve, Lime announced they would, indeed, be shutting down service, though they “remain very committed to working with the City of Seattle to create a robust mobility program in the Spring that includes a mix of free-floating scooters and improved bike options that are a priority to the City.”
Lime was the last of the original three bike share companies to launch in Seattle in the summer of 2017. Spin, one of the other three original companies, has since switched to scooters and has stated in the past that they are interested in operating scooters in Seattle.
The loss of Lime comes just as Sound Transit is preparing a major multi-month service reduction on light rail service downtown as they work to connect the East Link tracks to the existing line. Bike share could help relieve pressure on the crunched downtown trains, so let’s hope JUMP sticks around.
Some of the most significant changes to Washington State’s rules of the road in recent history will take effect January 1, when SB 5723 becomes law.
Perhaps the biggest and most exciting change is that people driving will now have clear instruction on how to safely and legally pass someone on a bike (or riding a horse, a carriage or tractor):
If there is more than one lane in the direction of travel, people driving must “completely” change lanes to pass.
If there is only one lane in the direction of travel, people driving must slow to a safe speed “relative to the speed of the individual” and only pass once there is at least three feet of space between their vehicle and the person biking. If three feet is not available, people driving must change lanes into the opposing lane when it is safe to do so.
The new law also clarifies the responsibilities for people biking. If there is enough space in the lane for safe passing, people biking must ride to the right to allow passing. But you are not required to squeeze to the right if there is not enough space in the lane for safe passing or if “other conditions make it unsafe to do so.” So if there is debris or damaged pavement or parked cars with doors that could swing open at any moment or another road user, you are not required to move right.
The law passed during the 2019 legislative session with wide bipartisan support (70-26 in the House, 43-5 in the Senate) and is in large part thanks to the advocacy work of Washington Bikes.
These changes are very favorable to people biking and set a new standard for safe passing laws in the U.S. They make it clear that a person’s safety is paramount. No, they won’t suddenly make it super comfortable to bike on the many streets and highways in our state that have no bike lanes or adequate shoulders. But they at least remove a lot of the doubt about what is legally expected of everyone.
Of course this brings us to the big questions: Will people know the law has changed? And will it be enforced?
You may bike in the right turn lane even if you aren’t turning
UW Researcher Julie McCleery says she has found that King County kids are not getting the hour of exercise per day that the CDC recommends. She also found that girls are less likely to get their exercise than boys, and kids from immigrant families are being left behind.
McCleery is largely focused on how organized sports can help kids stay active, and that’s great. But her story should also be a guide for safe streets advocates and departments of transportation. Because a sport is one way to get exercise, but walking, biking and generally playing outside work, too. And unlike with sports, walking, biking and playing outside don’t require joining a team or following a schedule.
“Further, we learned that children being raised in immigrant families were less likely to play at parks near their homes,” McCleery wrote. She does not talk about bike lanes or trails, but that is worthy of future study.
It’s hard to think of many things more important than the health of children. Part of the safe streets vision is that neighborhood space could return to the neighborhood kids. Everyone should feel safe letting their kids play outside their homes, and people driving should feel like guests on streets the neighborhood kids own. But aside from just creating infrastructure, we also need to make sure everyone has a sense of ownership of our public spaces, whether that’s a park or a bike lane or a street.
Editor’s Note: This post introduces a new type of post on Seattle Bike Blog I am calling a “shortcut.” Shortcuts could be many things, but they will all be short. They could be a quick link to a survey or advocacy alert. Maybe there’s a project update that doesn’t need much new reporting. Or maybe another news outlet has reported something I think you should all see. I am hoping that Shortcuts will be a way to get more news to you more quickly and create more prompts for comments and conversation, but in a way that differentiates these quick posts from my longer posts with more original reporting or commentary. So let me know what you think in the comments below.
It’s really happening! Work is just weeks away from starting on the Northgate bike/walk bridge over I-5, and the goal is still to have it open by the time Northgate Station begins light rail service in September 2021. It’s a complicated project, so it could be cutting it close depending on construction delays.
The start of the project has already been delayed several times, including a major redesign after the original design’s bids came in much higher than budgeted. The trail will be 16 feet wide and connect the station to North Seattle College, dramatically increasing the number of homes west of I-5 within a short walk or bike ride of the new light rail station.
SDOT is hosting a series of open houses the second week of January for people who want to learn more about the project or project construction. Details from SDOT: (more…)
One of so many scooters around Denver’s downtown Union Station.
When (or if) Seattle launches its scooter share pilot in early 2020 as planned, users of the shared scooters will not be allowed to ride on the sidewalk like people biking can. That’s just one of the interesting bits of news included in the city’s recently-released environmental checklist and reported by the Seattle Times’ Heidi Groover.
The city is also going to place a 20,000-unit combined limit on the total number of shared bikes and scooters allowed to operate in the city. That could put companies in a position to choose between bikes and scooters. So this could be bad news for bike share, since bikes reportedly get fewer rides per day than scooters and several companies have been closing down bike operations in other markets in favor of scooters.
I can’t say that bike share has been a big business success, but it has been very effective at increasing the number of trips people are taking by bike in our city. I hope Lime, JUMP (and maybe Lyft?) find a way to keep bikes in operation alongside scooters.
Bike share in Seattle has also been very safe despite the relative lack of helmet use, the city notes in the environmental checklist:
“SDOT’s pilot evaluation for free-floating bike share found the following: 24% of riders reported wearing helmets, five riders reported collisions, and that out of 96 bike-related injuries only three occurred while using bike share (conducted by researchers at the University of Washington).”
It’s not yet clear how scooter share safety will compare to bike share safety. They are fundamentally different vehicles, and scooter safety studies have been sort of all over the place so far. An Austin Public Health study (PDF) found pretty grim results, especially for first-time riders. But Portland didn’t find results all that different from bike use. Scooter designs are also evolving quickly, and hopefully user control and stopping ability will have improved since scooters first launched en masse a few years ago. Hopefully companies are also better at instructing first-time user on how to ride. (more…)
The car traffic plan for the arena’s new parking garages. From a presentation to the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board (PDF)
As part of the transportation plan for the new arena in Seattle Center, developers and the City of Seattle are currently planning to delete the north end of the 2nd Ave protected bike lane and steal crossing time from people walking on Denny Way, all in a hopeless effort to move more cars.
These plans, first reported by Ryan Packer at The Urbanist, go against our city’s transportation and climate policies and goals, fly in the face of clear community concerns about so-called “adaptive” traffic signals and would rewind some of the incredible bike progress our city has made thanks in large part to the 2nd Ave protected bike lane. City leaders should demand SDOT and the arena team come up with a better plan that encourages biking, walking and transit rather than driving cars.
Driving will never be a good way to get to Seattle Center. Even if they follow through on their plan to cut down on biking and walking access to try to squeeze a few more cars in and out of the area, they will fail. This isn’t theoretical. There is no path to success if they are defining success as moving lots of cars through Uptown, South Lake Union and Belltown. They will fail, 100 percent guaranteed. But they can succeed in making it more difficult, dangerous and time-consuming to bike, walk and take transit as their current plans would. We should not let them.
Don’t delete our city’s premiere bike lane
Since this is Seattle Bike Blog, let’s start with the 2nd Ave bike lane. In order to better serve people who drive cars all the way to the new planned garages just a block or two from the area, the plan would delete a section of the most successful and impactful new bike lanes in the whole city in order to create a second lane for cars on 2nd Ave at Denny. Instead, people biking would be routed onto an almost-certainly crowded sidewalk. So people biking and walking get squeezed together in half the space they have today while people driving get double the space.
As we have reported, biking is booming right now. The number of trips by bike this year is obliterating the previous records, and this is in no small part due to bike improvements like the 2nd Ave protected bike lane. To replace this bike lane so that parking garages can empty out faster following events is simply wrong. It is backwards. It must be stopped.
The arena plan does include a new protected bike lane that winds blocks out of the way to 1st Ave and Queen Anne Ave (1st is two blocks from 2nd here because lol Seattle streets). Those new bike lanes would be great for serving the Uptown business district and beyond, but they are far less direct for people heading to Seattle Center. And Seattle Center is not only a pretty big destination, it is also a wonderful and popular bike cut-through for people heading to various places, including 5th Ave, the Mercer Street bike lane under Aurora and, soon, Thomas Street to South Lake Union.
People who drive to the parking garages for an event can just wait their turn to get out using the lane that exists. It should be expected that if you drive to a Seattle Center event, it’s going to take some time to get out of the parking garage at the end. We should not destroy our best bike route in a vain attempt to let them get out a little faster. Pacing the cars leaving the garages might even help alleviate the traffic problems on other streets in the area, so it’s not a bad outcome.
The 2nd Ave bike lane helps move people 24/7. It is absurd to ruin it so that very temporary event crowds a few times a week can drive away a tiny bit faster. It doesn’t even play a role in pre-event traffic, only post-event.
Instead, they should extend the 2nd Ave bike lane two more blocks north to connect seamlessly to Seattle Center’s car-free center. That would have a more tangible and positive impact on all-way, all-day mobility on this street and it would be an investment in a future that we want, not an investment in furthering the traffic-clogged nightmare we already have.
Don’t repeat Mercer’s mistakes on Denny
The city’s so-called “adaptive” traffic signals on Mercer Street have been the subject of intense scorn from neighbors and advocates for more walking because they basically just steal time from people walking and give it to people driving. I think the designers and promoters of this system think they are being more sophisticated than that, but they aren’t. Their fancy systems don’t count pedestrian delays, they only count car delays. In order to cross the street, you have to push a button to get a walk signal at all, then you have to wait. And wait. And wait. The more car traffic there is, the longer people walking are forced to wait. That’s the “adaptive” part. It adapts to bad car traffic by making people who are not contributing to car traffic wait more. And in case you haven’t noticed, traffic on Mercer is still terrible. The adaptive signals just make sure it’s also terrible to walk there.
Well, it worked so poorly on Mercer that the arena team and Seattle are currently planning on doing the same thing on Denny Way. Denny Way is full of cars. Nothing can be done to the signal timing to change that. The only fix for Denny is to prioritize more efficient ways to move people on that street.
Established city transportation policy, codified in just about every document approved by the City Council in the past decade, is that our goal is to move people and goods, not just cars. The current plan for Denny is so blinded by the goal of moving cars that it is destined to to fail everyone, people driving included.
Denny has a major bus route, King County Metro’s Route 8. It’s one of the busiest routes in the entire county. And everyone who has ever ridden it knows the 8’s nickname: The Late. What if instead of trying to cram more cars onto a street that’s already full of them we try to liberate the 8 from traffic and make it the obvious best way to get up and down Denny Way? Denny is diagonal street that breaks the grid, which makes it extremely important for transit and walking especially. A fast, reliable bus on Denny would be transformative to our city. Driving will never be a good way to get around the Denny Triangle, Belltown and South Lake Union. There’s nothing the city can do about that. But the city can build bus lanes and free the 8.
Money planned to go to Denny Way adaptive signals should go to transit improvements instead. Again, this would be the option consistent with our city’s transportation and climate policies and goals.
Seattle does not want more car infrastructure. Our city has been very clear about that through our major votes for levies focused on transit, walking and biking, and our votes for leaders who prioritize transit, walking and biking. And we are not afraid to invest in a vision. We care about the climate. We want better transit. And we want to improve safety for people walking and biking. The points in the arena traffic plan that go against these priorities should be abandoned and replaced with investments in the city we actually want.
Mayor Jenny Durkan made a pretty strong statement this week in support of safe streets. And during her talk, she said, “If you don’t have to drive, do not drive. Get out of your cars. If you can get on a bike, if you can walk, if you can bus or light rail, please do that. If you have to get in your cars, slow down. You are not going to get there that much faster by going faster.”
Right on, Mayor. I think the arena traffic plan team needs to hear this message from you, too.
I hope she directs SDOT to revisit these two car-blinded elements of the arena plan and come back with investments that align with our city’s vision for big increases in walking, biking and transit. Because that vision is more important than reducing the wait time for people trying to drive out of a garage immediately following an event. This process has gone sideways, and we need city leaders to recenter it on our city’s real goals. Let’s move more people safer and more sustainably.
