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.
SDOT has been adding a ton of additional bike parking. Could that be part of why poorly parked bikes are becoming less common?
The city’s quarterly audit of bike share parking (PDF) found a massive 57% drop in the percentage of Jump and Lime bikes parked incorrectly.
Of 756 bikes audited (approximately half Lime and half Jump), staff found only one (0.1%) that was an “ADA-prohibited obstruction hazard,” basically bikes that don’t leave a minimum of four feet of walkway space. This is way down from the 13 (1.6%) found in the second quarter of this year. 5.3% of bikes were deemed “obstruction hazards,” meaning they were obstructing a walkway or curb ramp, but not completely blocking it. This is down from 17.4% in the second quarter.
What could explain such a big decrease in poor parking? I can’t say for sure, but I have some theories.
Rooted In Rights produced a great video for SDOT explaining not only where to properly park a bike, but also why poorly-parked bikes create such problems for people with disabilities. It’s been viewed 5,000 times on Youtube, so that’s pretty decent exposure. And while I’m sure the video inspired some people to do a better job of parking bikes, I bet it also inspired people to move poorly-parked bikes when they encounter them.
From SDOT.Photo taken May 31 shows that the bike lane ends before the intersection.
Here’s some great news for southend bike riders: SDOT has decided to complete the westbound S Columbian Way bike lane at Beacon Ave after all.
As we reported in June, neighbors of the major Columbian Way repaving project were surprised to see that the brand new protected bike lane ended about a half block early, leaving an uncomfortable uphill gap used by people driving turning right on to Beacon Ave. The bike lane, the biggest bike infrastructure improvement in southeast Seattle this year, was supposed to be a complete connection all the way to 15th Ave S, serving Mercer Middle School and Jefferson Park. There was no mention on the project website that the bike lane had been cut back half a block, and advocates were caught unaware. Even some SDOT staffers didn’t seem aware of the change.
Needless to say, people were pretty upset, yours truly included. As I wrote:
“A bike route is only as comfortable as its least comfortable section. A missing gap like this is likely the difference between whether a family will use the lane with their kids or not, for example. This is the route from Columbia City to Jefferson Park and Mercer Middle School, for example. So eleven-year-olds are now supposed to just merge with car traffic every day while biking up a major hill to school?”
Well, SDOT listened, and they are fixing it. Right now. (more…)
Mayor Jenny Durkan made her boldest safe streets stand yet when she unveiled a 25 mph speed limit sign on Rainier Ave S, the first of several thousand sign changes coming in the next year and a half. But that’s just part of her effort to get Vision Zero back on track in the second half of her term.
The city will also add more red light cameras, add speed zone cameras to five more school zones and have SPD conduct more crosswalk yielding enforcement. A new Major Crash Review Task Force “will convene a panel of experts to analyze every serious and fatal collision in our City and provide recommendations to prevent similar incidents from happening again,” according to an SDOT Blog post. It’s rather amazing such an effort doesn’t already exist, so this is a welcome effort. It could be especially effective if the task force is empowered to direct major street safety changes.
And one of the biggest improvements may be among the most difficult to see: A major increase in the number of traffic signals across the city that give people walking a short head start. In fact, the city has already been quietly implementing these “leading pedestrian intervals,” which are very easy and cheap to do. Essentially, you simply program the signal to show the walk sign a few seconds before the green light. That way people on foot are well-established and visible before people turning their cars start to move. This StreetFilms video explains the concept well:
Seattle has dramatically increased the number of these walking head starts in the past couple years, going from just a couple a few years ago to 125 today. And the city now plans to double that total by the end of 2020.
From SDOT (UPDATED 12/11 to add the 2020 projection).
In addition to writing, I also take care of this incredible kiddo.
The contract is signed, so it’s official: I’m writing a book about Seattle bike culture and politics for University of Washington Press.
Tentatively titled “Biking Uphill In the Rain” and code-named (by me) “Seattle Bike Book,” the book will take a big step back from the daily news grind and look at what has been happening in this town. What has worked? What failed? And what does it take to build a movement to challenge an entrenched and dangerous car culture?
The book will give me a chance to conduct some long-form interviews and go deeper than I can go in my near-daily posts on this site. With the advantage of hindsight, I will highlight some unsung heroes and reflect on the styles of advocacy that has proven effective in the long-run. It won’t see a bookshelf until at least 2022, since UW Press has a lengthy peer-review process. But I’m excited that the scale and timeline of release will allow me to get some distance from current-day city politics.
Don’t worry, Seattle Bike Blog isn’t going anywhere. In fact, I will need your support more than ever if I am going to pull this off. The book advance is enough to replace my tired 2010 Macbook Pro, which I’ve used to type nearly every word on this site, but not too much else.
More than 90 readers pitch in a combined $600 every month as Seattle Bike Blog Supporters, and a handful of great local businesses invest in advertisements. Through this income, I have been able to provide truly independent reporting about biking and transportation in Seattle since 2010. I am not beholden to any politician, organization or company, and I intend to write an honest account of our city’s bike movement, warts and all.
But I won’t be able to do it without you. That’s why I’m also launching my second-ever supporter drive. My goal is to double the site’s monthly reader support by the end of January. So I’m hoping to get to $1,200 per month, which would be 180 people at our current average contribution rate of $6.60. I’m also urging current supporters to consider increasing your contribution if you can to help me reach this goal.
Anyone who has contributed for at least one year will have the option to be acknowledged in print when the book is published. And, of course, you will know that you are supporting Seattle Bike Blog’s continued and effective work.
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