A hard-fought, 1.2-mile section of the E Lake Sammamish Trail finally opens today after more than a year of construction and many, many years of planning and advocacy.
King County Parks is hosting an opening celebration at 2 p.m. today (Wednesday), after which the trail will be only one segment away from linking Issaquah and Redmond.
The newest 1.2 miles (“South Sammamish A”) connects to the existing section into Issaquah. It doesn’t make many new major connections, but it’s one vital step closer to a completed trail.
With the 520 Bridge Trail now open, the Eastside Trail under construction and the E Lake Sammamish Trail slowly rolling out, the region’s trail system is in the midst of a serious expansion phase. But this work isn’t happening by accident. Advocates, neighbors and public servants have been working on these projects for a very long time.
Details on the opening celebration, from King County (RSVP): (more…)
After decades of public meetings and open houses and letter-writing campaigns, it’s perhaps a bit difficult to get motivated for yet another public event about the Ballard Missing Link of the Burke-Gilman Trail. But what if I told you there would be beer?
A slate of supporting organizations are holding a happy hour 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. tomorrow (Wednesday) at Peddler Brewing to show support for completing the trail and have some drinks together. Mike O’Brien, who is both the local District Councilmember and the Chair of the Transportation Committee, will also be there continuing his leadership working for a completed trail.
If you can’t make the happy hour (or want to go above and beyond), Cascade has also created this handy online form to send Mayor Jenny Durkan a letter supporting the trail. They are also looking for folks to show up and testify in favor of completing the trail during the Transportation Committee meeting 2 p.m. Friday at City Hall.
Photo by WA Bikes featuring my amazing spouse Kelli, who works for the organization, and our new e-bike we plan to use to stay car-free once our child is born.
What exactly is an electric-assist bicycle? And where can you ride one?
Providing state-level clarity on these questions is one part of Washington Bikes’ 2018 state legislative agenda, along with efforts to protects multimodal transportation funding, protect and connect trails, and better measure the economic benefit and health cost savings from bicycling.
Sure, an e-assist bike has a motor, but it rides like a bicycle. Sometimes e-bikes are treated like any other bicycle, but sometimes laws treat them as motor vehicles. Confusingly, one set of regulations ties e-assist bicycles, mopeds, motorized foot scooters and motorized assistive mobility scooters together in some — but not all — cases. E-bikes are allowed in bike lanes, but not sidewalks. They are also allowed on trails, except where local jurisdictions say they are not allowed. And local jurisdictions rarely make their exceptions clear to users.
It’s all a bit confusing, which is a problem both for users and for a growing industry that holds big promise for increasing access to bicycling to more Washington residents of all ages and abilities. Studies have demonstrated that riding an e-assist bike still provides a significant amount of exercise, which so many residents of our state do not get. So state leaders should be looking for ways to encourage more e-assist biking.
For example, Seattle’s extraordinarily popular Westlake bikeway is a bike lane, but do the connections on either end of the bikeway count as trails or sidewalks? What about the biking and walking paths leading to and crossing the Fremont and Montlake Bridges? I honestly can’t tell you the answer off the top of my head, and I’m a journalist who has been covering bicycle transportation for seven years. The line between “trail” and “sidewalk” is often very blurry. If you’re riding a bicycle, the difference doesn’t matter because both are legal. But if you’re on an e-bike, it technically does matter.
In reality, people with e-bikes just ride them like they are on a regular bicycle, and I’ve never seen any empirical evidence that this is causing any problems. I also haven’t heard of many (any?) cases where someone was been ticketed for riding an e-assist bike on a sidewalk. So why not just simplify state law to reflect how things are already working? (more…)
As we reported previously, the City of Bellevue plans to build one or more demonstration bike lanes in its downtown core this spring as a pilot project to try out the design and give people a chance to see them in action.
Since announcing the concept, 108th Ave NE has emerged as the single best street for a bike lane pilot, Cascade Bicycle Club’s Vicky Clarke wrote in a recent blog post. The central north-south street “is a major north/south corridor through downtown that’s home to many large office towers, adjacent to the transit center and connected by bike existing facilities to the I-90 and SR-520 trails,” she wrote. Especially considering the potential for bike share expansion to Bellevue, a strong connection to the Bellevue transit center has huge potential for serving more people for more trips.
Imagine stepping off a bus in the heart of Bellevue and finding a $1 bike waiting for you next to a safe, comfortable bike lane that goes where you’re going.
Cascade has put out a call for people to show up to the Bellevue Transportation Commission meeting 6:30 p.m. tomorrow (Thursday) at Bellevue City Hall to voice support for the bike lane pilot.
Promo photos from Spin and LimeBike showing off their new e-assist bikes.
Yesterday, both Spin and LimeBike announced electric-assist bicycles, an innovation that — if successful — could change the bike share industry all over again.
LimeBike will likely be the first to launch e-bikes in Seattle, saying in a press release that the bikes will be available “starting in January 2018.” The company is currently planning 300-500 bikes for Seattle. Spin is launching their first e-bikes in smaller markets where they are exclusive operators.
Seattle has hills. That’s an unchanging fact. So the potential for a well-run, dependable and approachable e-assist bike share service is immense. It could make bike share more accessible to more people and make more kinds of trips possible for everyone. A trip from downtown directly to First Hill? It’s possible on a non-assisted bike, but it’s a tough grind that only a handful of people are going to choose to make. But with a little boost, it could put a huge number of homes and jobs within an easy bike ride of downtown transit service, for example.
Of course, how an e-assist bike share system without docks (and, therefore, regular charging stations) is mostly unexplored territory. Social Bicycles operates the Jump e-assist system in San Fransisco and Washington DC, and there are a couple e-assist bike share systems in a handful of cities around the world. But it is still a very new concept, and having bikes with higher capital and maintenance costs raises a lot of new challenges for the operators. (more…)
