Concept image of a dramatically-improved crosswalk on NE 65th Street by Joe Mangan.
Just about every school day when Joe Mangan and his fellow Roosevelt High School students walk to area businesses during their lunch breaks, they have to squeeze together on sidewalks so skinny they can barely walk side-by-side and talk to each other. And when they get to major intersections, they have to squish together at corners far too small for the number of students walking to grab a bite. Meanwhile, traffic rushes by just off the curb on an unusually dangerous stretch of NE 65th Street.
But Mangan knows it doesn’t need to be this way.
“I was noticing that friends and other students trying to walk to lunch don’t have enough space to wait at corners,” Mangan said. “I decided I would take things into my own hands.”
So he took the initiative to put together his own proposal for what a truly safe and multimodal NE 65th Street could look like complete with concept 3D graphics he created using Sketchup. He sent his 12-page report (PDF) to SDOT, some neighborhood safe streets groups and Seattle Bike Blog.
There were two more profiles about people working with the Bellevue and Marysville police departments to send unreclaimed/abandoned bicycles to African communities.
The southern 1.2-mile portion of the East Lake Sammamish Trail opened on Tuesday. The middle 3.6 miles is stuck in a City of Sammamish v. King County standoff.
The Seattle hearing examiner will soon rule on the EIS lawsuit brought by the opponents of the Burke-Gilman Trail Missing Link project. Pro-trail businesses and organizations held a happy hour & action party last night, hoping Mayor Jenny Durkan is ready to be the hero by being the mayor finally able to complete the project.
The Stinky Spoke ride is on Saturday, benefiting Outdoors for All.
Seattle needs more fun on bikes! That’s why we’re organizing “Bike Happy Month” — a month of crowdsourced, DIY bike fun to close-out the 2018 summer in the vein of Portland’s Pedalpalooza — with a huge street party in Ballard to cap it off.
We need your financial and volunteer help to make it a reality, which is why we’re launching a crowdfunding campaign. Help us reach our initial goal level of $2,500, which assures we can at least fund the bare bones of the events.
You will receive rewards at designated contribution levels. For $30, you’ll receive an event poster. At $50, you’ll also receive t-shirt. At $100, you’ll receive a beer glass.
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…)
