Lime launched a digital campaign Wednesday to encourage its users to contact Seattle city leaders and ask them to allow scooter share. In just one day, the company says more than 3,000 people have done so.
Before ofo and Spin left town in July, people in Seattle were taking more than 200,000 bike share trips a month. But Lime reports that in markets that have both bikes and scooters, the scooters each get several times more use per day than the bikes. So there is big potential for scooters to carry a lot of trips, and all the city needs to do is write up some permit rules to allow them.
“Especially given impending major traffic challenges, we are committed to providing last mile mobility choices to this community and believe scooters should be a part of that,” said Lime’s Washington State General Manager Isaac Gross in an emailed statement. “Clearly, Seattleites agree.” (more…)
While Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkan tries to end her city’s open streets events, Bainbridge Island is getting ready to host its first ever Open Streets Festival from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday.
The City of Bainbridge Island, with leadership help from the Bainbridge Mobility Alliance, will create an all-ages-and-abilities circuit from downtown Winslow to the high school and back. Some sections of the route already have bike paths, but other busier sections will temporarily become one-way streets for cars so that the other half of the street can be reserved for biking, walking, skateboarding and more.
If you have never biked onto the Bainbridge ferry, Saturday is the day to give it a try. It’s a wonderful way to spend a weekend day even without the Open Streets Festival.
In addition to the route, there will be a handful of events at the high school, Waterfront Park and Winslow Green.
You’ve probably heard this argument at some point as an excuse for why your town shouldn’t even try to build quality bike infrastructure. But half a century ago, death in traffic was rampant in the Netherlands just like the United States. Now they are among the safest in the world. How did they do it?
Well, there is a lot to unpack in that question, which is why Seattle Neighborhood Greenways is hosting Vancouver’s Melissa and Chris Bruntlett Friday evening for a presentation and discussion called “Building the Cycling City: Dutch Lessons for Seattle” (Seattle Bike Blog is a sponsor). Tickets are sliding scale and benefit Seattle Neighborhood Greenways. Buy them online.
If you can’t make the Friday event, you can catch Melissa and Chris Saturday morning during Bainbridge Island’s Open Streets Festival (stay tuned for more on that).
Bellevue wants to know what you think of their demonstration bike lanes on 108th Ave NE, so take their online survey and let them know.
The city opened the new bike lanes this summer as a practical test of the concept through the heart of the downtown core. The lanes connect to the transit center and were accompanied by the launch of Lime e-bikes, which allow more people to use the new lanes.
They aren’t perfect, but the relatively low-budget lanes are a test of the concept that the city’s transportation planners say they will continue to improve depending on how things are working. So let them know!
Editor’s Note: Seattle Bike Blog reported yesterday on newly-released 2017 American Communities Survey data that estimates that the number of people biking to work is declining in Seattle. In response, the folks at Seattle Neighborhood Greenways wrote this guest post looking at the start-and-stop construction of a useful bike network in our city and discusses where we can go from here.
The number of people biking to work in Seattle has not been growing. This is disappointing, but it is neither surprising nor is it an inevitable trend.
60% of people in Seattle want to bike more but don’t. They want to bike more because biking for transportation makes us happier, keeps us healthier, saves us money, and reduces pollution.
But safety is the number one reason they choose not to.
The reality is that Seattle’s bicycle routes are still fragmented, inconsistent, and dangerous. We need quick implementation of a large-scale, connected network of safe, protected routes in order to see meaningful change in how people are choosing to get around.
After Sher Kung was tragically killed by a driver on 2nd Ave in 2014 the city acted quickly to build the first protected bike lane in downtown Seattle, but progress since then has been lethargic. In 2016, former Mayor Ed Murray put the Basic Bike Network on indefinite hold.
Seattle Neighborhood Greenways pushed back against this delay. Led by family bikers, we filled City Hall holding signs saying “My Family Bikes” and “Safe Streets Now,” and chanting “We can’t wait!” As a result of these protests, planning for the Basic Bike Network moved forward.
Former Seattle Neighborhood Greenways Executive Director Cathy Tuttle addresses a crowd gathered in May 2016 to urge city leaders to treat traffic violence like the public health emergency it is.
Bike commute trends, from the American Community Survey.
The latest Census survey does not look great for bike commuting, at least as the primary mode that people use to get to work on an everyday basis. The data is especially harsh for women biking to work, a count that has seemingly plummeted compared to recent years.
The annual American Community Survey asks residents which mode of transportation they used most to travel to work “last week.” So this is not a measure of total biking, only bike commuting. And there is no accounting for mixed trips, where someone bikes (or uses bike share) to connect to transit or for people who bike some days but not others. And by asking “last week,” a response will be very weather dependent. So, for example, many of the people who started biking to UW Station when it opened in 2016 would be filed under public transit, not biking.
The survey comes out annually, and the data released this week is from 2017. The data can vary quite significantly from year-to-year, so it’s typically not a good idea to take a single year of data too seriously until you see a multi-year trend. For example, we had a very positive survey in 2012 that, after looking at the trends, was probably an overestimate (perhaps 2015 as well).
I am similarly a bit skeptical of the 2017 numbers, which seem almost impossibly low and don’t seem to match up with the Fremont Bridge numbers. Those counts — which include all bike trips, not just commute trips — have been fairly steady:
Fremont Bridge annual bike trip counts are much less variable than the Census survey. And the promising news is that 2018 Fremont Bridge counts are way up compared to 2017.
