Seattle Bike Blog

Alert 1/19-2/2: 520 Bridge Trail will be closed for two weeks

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 16, 2024
Closure map from WSDOT.

The trail across the 520 Bridge will be fully closed for two weeks starting January 19 as crews work move the walking and biking route in Montlake into its permanent alignment and install an overhead sign.

The closure begins alongside a weekend of major work that will also close Montlake and Lake Washington Boulevards to motor vehicles. There will be a walking and biking path through the Montlake Blvd. work zone, but not across Lake Washington. Or at least, maybe not. WSDOT updated the construction notice over the holiday weekend to add this intriguing line:

All trail users will need to find alternate routes. WSDOT is looking into ways to accommodate people who use the trail during this closure. Those accommodations are not finalized yet, but WSDOT wants to make sure the public is aware the work is coming.

Very mysterious. Assuming the closure goes ahead as currently planned, this would be one of the longest closures of the 520 Bridge trail yet. Late January is probably the least bad time of the year for such a closure since ridership typically at its low point. On the other hand, cold and rainy days do make the long detours that much more difficult for the people who are riding. The only bike detour options are to go all the way around the north end of the lake or to detour down to the I-90 Bridge, both of which add a lot of miles and time.

You can also put your bike on a bus to cross the lake. The most common buses that serve the SR-520 freeway stations are: Metro 255 (U District to Kirkland), Sound Transit 542 (U District to Redmond) and Sound Transit 545 (Downtown to Redmond).

Heading east, you can catch any of the U District-originating buses on the south side of NE Pacific Street near the UW Health Sciences Education building or on 15th Ave NE south of Campus Parkway.

Heading west, you can take the elevators at Evergreen Point or Yarrow Point to catch the 255, 542 (to U District) and 545 (to downtown). You can also catch Metro 271 (U District to Bellevue/Issaquah) on 84th Ave NE just south of 520 in Medina.

Also be aware that on days the Montlake ramps to 520 are closed, such as the January 19 weekend, the U District buses will be on significant reroutes. Check the Metro and Sound Transit websites for plan your time accordingly.
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tags: 520 trail, Bike Route Alert, montlake, wsdot

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G&O Family Cyclery is closing after ten years

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 12, 2024
From a March 2017 community celebration of G&O moving to its latest location one year after the Greenwood gas explosion. Founders Tyler Gillies and Davey Oil are in the grey caps. Gillies left a few years ago and now runs Dandelion Bikes at 18th and Jackson.

In a devastating and unexpected announcement Friday, G&O Family Cyclery sent a message to customers that the shop is permanently closing. They will be totally closed until January 17, then they will reopen to sell off remaining stock. They are also working to complete existing orders, but are no longer taking service appointments.

This news comes on the heels of a series of bike shop closures in the area, a troubling nationwide trend. Like several other industries, bike demand went through the roof in the first couple years of the pandemic when supplies were limited. Now supplies are plentiful, but demand has dropped back down. At the same time, the margins on running a shop dependent on in-person retail sales have continued shrinking. Some mainstay bike shops like Velo and Counterbalance closed, and now G&O is joining them.

“The business has not been consistently profitable ever,” said owner Davey Oil, who is also a personal friend of mine. (Full disclosure: G&O has been a Seattle Bike Blog advertiser). They have had ups and downs, but “the inciting event was unexpected,” he said. “A loan was denied that I had been assured we had secured.” As a result, they “were not able to secure the funds we would have needed to get through a very lean winter.”

Half the team at G&O has already been laid off, and the remaining staff will be on hand to work through what is necessary to close the shop (UPDATE: Jenna from G&O has set up a GoFundMe to support staff). Oil is taking sales offers if anyone wants to own a family bike shop.

The shop’s challenges are two-fold, according to Oil: The cost of quality electric cargo bikes is “unreasonably high” for most people, and the cost of living in Seattle is too high for the skilled tradespeople needed to run this kind of specialty shop. “I think it’s impossible to operate a shop like this without a sizeable staff of very well-trained and knowledgeable workers,” said Oil, but “Seattle is not affordable to tradespeople.” He said he was trying to figure out some way to increase worker pay and grow the number of staffers when the loan was denied and the bottom fell out.

Washington State passed funding for e-bike subsidies in the 2023-25 budget, but WSDOT has not yet set up the distribution process to get those subsidies to buyers. So that is a bright spot on the horizon for a future family and cargo bike shop, but it will come too late to save G&O. “What I hope for for the next family cyclery, customers have access to more subsidies that make them more affordable so that a broader range of customers can use them,” said Oil.
(more…)
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tags: bike shops, davey oil, g&o family cyclery

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Seattle’s mixed history building neighborhood greenways

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 10, 2024
Neighborhood greenways have a hit and miss history in Seattle. Sometimes they create fantastic all ages and abilities walking and biking connections, and sometimes they are so heavily compromised that they do very little. So as Seattle prepares to create a new transportation plan and craft a new transportation funding measure, we should probably get a handle on what works, what doesn’t and why.

Ryan Packer at the Urbanist posed the issue in a recent post:

Seattle’s greenway network turns 12 years old this year, with the 39th Avenue NE greenway in Wedgwood one of the very first corridors that the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) upgraded when it tried out the idea in mid-2012, right after N 43rd and N 44th Streets in Wallingford. At the time, Seattle was following in the footsteps of Portland, Oregon, which officially started branding its bike boulevards “neighborhood greenways” in 2009, but which had been implementing projects like them going back to the 1980s.

As Seattle starts to consider the next iteration of the 2015 Move Seattle levy, which expires at the end of the year, the city has an opportunity to reassess how neighborhood greenway infrastructure has been implemented, and how big of a role the continued expansion of the network should have moving forward. With significant gaps still remaining in the on-street bike network, and many miles of bike lanes still in need of upgrades in the form of physical protection and signal infrastructure, 2024 could be a key decision point.
Read more…

Most (or perhaps all) of the worst neighborhood greenways in Seattle have one thing in common: They were created not to build new connections for people but rather as a way for SDOT to avoid building bike lanes and better crosswalks on a nearby arterial street. Many of the city’s worst neighborhood greenways were started for the wrong reasons and had project-breaking limitations baked into them from day one.

A great (or terrible?) example is the stretch of neighborhood greenway on 17th Ave SW in Delridge. Picture this: You’re biking along, following the helpful signs pointing the way along the neighborhood greenway when all of sudden there is a staircase in the middle of the road.

Photo from a 2016 ride shortly after the route opened. Not only is this a poor feature for a bike route, but it also neglects the “all abilities” goal.
(more…)
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tags: 2024 transportation funding measure, beacon hill, delridge, neighborhood greenways, parks and recreation, rainier valley neighborhood greenway, ryan packer, sdot, seattle transportation plan, the urbanist

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What does Seattle’s new City Council mean for safe streets?

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 8, 2024
Seattle has a very new City Council, and the changes aren’t even complete yet. Five coucilmembers are new, and a sixth interim councilmember will be appointed soon. For a nine-person governing body, that’s a lot of turnover all at once.

Washington Bikes asked all the candidates for their stances on various bike issues, and none of the councilmembers ran on being anti-bikes. Here’s their scorecard summary:

WA Bikes also asked candidates about issues specifically affecting their districts. Here are those responses:

Councilmember Rob Saka (District 1), will chair the Transportation Committee after the previous chair, Alex Pedersen (District 4) chose not to run for reelection. It will be very interesting to see how Saka chooses to lead this committee, which has seen very different leadership styles throughout the past decade. Pedersen’s time as Transportation Chair was notable largely for its relative inactivity. Former Councilmember Mike O’Brien had been a very active Transportation Chair, packing agendas, calling additional special meetings and regularly going overtime with his patented “I want to respect everyone’s time” warning. Pedersen, in contrast, usually had relatively sparse agendas and rarely used the committee to try to influence SDOT’s operational work such as questioning individual project designs. Before O’Brien, former Councilmember Tom Rasmussen had also been fairly hands-on with SDOT, willing to get in the weeds on project details with SDOT staff.
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tags: alex pedersen, bob kettle, city council, dan strauss, jenny durkan, joy hollingsworth, mike o’brien, publicola, rob saka, tammy morales, teresa mosqueda, the urbanist, tom rasmussen, transportation committee, washington bikes

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Fremont Bridge bike trips were nearly back to pre-pandemic levels in 2023

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 4, 2024
Travel patterns are still out of whack, but the number of bike trips across the Fremont Bridge in 2023 were up more than 13% over 2022, which was itself up more than 11% over 2021. Altogether, the number of people biking across the Ship Canal has almost returned to pre-pandemic levels, with 902,926 counted in 2023. That’s nearly 190,000 more trips than 2021.

That total still lags behind the astounding record set in 2019, when 1,187,146 trips were counted, but it is getting closer in line with the years preceding 2019 when the annual counts flirted with the 1 million mark. The Fremont Bridge is largely a measure of cross-city trips headed between the city center and the north end, but it has typically been our single best point for taking the city’s biking temperature because so many different bike routes all converge at this single point. The counts include both sidewalks, not just the side with the display.

However, the increase in people working from home since the start of the pandemic hit the Fremont Bridge bike counts hard because of its outsized role connecting homes to offices. The numbers are increasing as major employers try to get more people to work in their offices more often, but it remains unknown whether or when the center city workweek will return to the activity levels seen before the pandemic hit. As of 2022, Seattle had work from home rate far higher than the national average (25.4% for the region and 36% for the city versus 15% for the national average). Before the pandemic, the work from home rate was about 6.5%, according to Census data reported by Axios. Census data is released annually in the late summer, so comparable 2023 data is not yet available. It’s not just the office workers themselves who are a factor here, but also all the people working a wide variety of jobs that keep a bustling employment center functional. Service workers typically don’t get to work from home, those jobs simply disappear along with their associated bike trips across the Fremont Bridge.
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tags: bike counter, fremont bridge, work from home

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2023 Seattle bike and scooter share rides reach record 5.1 million rides as Lime consolidates its lead

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

January 2, 2024
Average daily trips by month, from SDOT’s shared micromobility dashboard.

Bike and scooter share services are more popular than ever in Seattle, and the number of rides in 2023 eclipsed even the wild days of $1 bikes back in 2017 and 2018. According to SDOT data based on real-time reporting from all permitted companies, people took 5.1 million trips on shared scooters and bikes in 2023, a 28% increase over 2022 and a 70% increase over the days of $1 pedal bikes in 2017-2018.

The bulk of the growth came from Lime, which has been the most popular and consistent service ever since Seattle started its experiment with dockless bike share in 2017. Lime represented about half of all trips in 2022, but they went on a tear in 2023 and increased their share to 64% of trips. This increase is perhaps even more surprising since the company also increased prices by about 8¢ per minute. It now costs $1 to unlock plus 44¢ per minute for an e-bike, which brings the cost of a 30-minute ride to $14.20.

Lime’s growth comes as its competitors struggle. Bird finally filed their long-anticipated bankruptcy last month. Bird is still operational, and the company says it hopes to continue operating after bankruptcy. Bird is the only company other than Lime to offer a proper bike share option. Veo, which operates a sit-down style scooter that technically counts as a bike, saw a decrease in rides from 425,500 in 2022 to 309,900 in 2023.

But perhaps most concerning for scooter riders is that Superpedestrian has officially shut down service in the U.S. after collapsing in 2023. The company shut off access to its LINK scooters December 26. LINK was the second-most popular service after Lime with 716,500 rides in 2023, down from 960,300 rides in 2022 when it rivaled Lime for the top scooter provider spot. Unlike Bird’s years-long decline, Superpedestrian’s collapse happened without much warning.
(more…)
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tags: bike share, bird, limebike, scooter share, sdot, superpedestrian, veo

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