UPDATE: The Lower Spokane St Bridge is back open again to all pedestrian, bicycle and vehicle traffic! Thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding.
— seattleDOTbridges (@SDOTbridges) June 26, 2018
The lower West Seattle Bridge has reopened following a more than five-day emergency repair of the vital biking and walking connection between West Seattle and the city center. The swing-style bridge was closed in the “open” position for maritime traffic during the work, forcing people biking to follow a miles-long detour to the 1st Avenue Bridge that required navigating industrial streets through Sodo that were in no shape to serve as a trail detour.
SDOT did run commute-time shuttles during the weekdays to help some people get around the closed bridge. But a shuttle is no replacement for a bridge, and people traveling outside commute times (or who did not know about the shuttle) were left with few good options for crossing the Duwamish River. And people who have never biked through Sodo before discovered just how neglected the bike network is in that major job center.
Of course, none of this is news to people who bike to work in Sodo or live in Georgetown, South Park, Allentown or many other South Seattle and South King County neighborhoods that require them to bike through the area regularly. And early bike share trip data highlights Sodo as a major source of rides. This data points to a big blind spot in local bike advocacy, which tends to focus on office job centers, retail businesses and neighborhoods rather than industrial areas. A ton of people are biking in Sodo despite the lack of safe routes.
The official bike detour for the bridge closure sent people down 1st Ave S, a very wide street with no bike lanes. To get a taste of how uncomfortable that route is for people biking, Robert Svercl made a little video: (more…)