Seattle Bike Blog

Four neighborhood rides will meet at City Hall for a Friday rally + Map of Bike Everywhere Day stations

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

May 18, 2017

Planned Celebration Stations, from Cascade’s map.

Cascade Bicycle Club is hosting four rides from different ends of town that will converge at City Hall Friday for a rally to support a Basic Bike Network to and through downtown.

The rides are part of the annual Bike Everywhere Day celebration (formerly known as “Bike to Work Day”). As always, there will be more than 100 “celebration stations” hosted by volunteers, community groups and businesses all over the region. Some have food, some have coffee, and some are just there to cheer you on as you bike to wherever it is you’re going early on a Friday morning.

Tomorrow is a great excuse to help your friend or co-worker bike to work for the first time. Most days, people aren’t standing around cheering you on just because you’re biking to work. And there will be a much bigger “safety in numbers” effect tomorrow as many new people give bike commuting a try.

That safety in numbers effect will be in full force for the four organized rides, especially the ride down Rainier Ave from Columbia City to City Hall. That’s right, Friday is your chance to ride the flattest and more direct route from Rainier Valley to downtown without fearing for your life in heavy, stressful traffic. Even if you don’t live in Rainier Valley, this ride might be worth waking up extra early to join. See you in Columbia City at 7:30 a.m.

And if you don’t work a downtown job, give yourself extra time to stop by a bunch of stations on your way in. You’ll also want to take time to appreciate all the new people out biking your route to work or school or wherever you go. Because Bike Everywhere Day is like a glimpse into the near future, when the number of people biking has grown just a little bit more.

Here’s the full map of stations: (more…)

tags: bike everywhere day 2017, bike to work day 2017, cascade bicycle club, rainier ave

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Salomon: Finally fixing NE 65th Street (Part One)

By

Andres Salomon

| Posted

May 17, 2017

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Part One of a two-part series by NE Seattle Greenways leader and former mayoral candidate (“I ran for Mayor before it was cool“) Andres Salomon. In this post, Salomon gives an update on the need for NE 65th Street safety improvements. Part Two will cover potential designs that the city could build to make 65th much safer for vulnerable users.

A tweet from 2014. The street remains unchanged.

The design of NE 65th St continues to be dangerous in the Roosevelt and Ravenna neighborhoods, resulting in numerous injuries and even deaths. The #Fix65th coalition is a group of concerned neighbors and community groups who have organized to advocate for safety fixes to NE 65th.

At the urging of Councilmember Rob Johnson, Mayor Ed Murray and SDOT finally got to work over the winter to kickstart an effort to fix the street. But the current plan would wait until 2019 to make any real improvements.

We can’t wait another two years for a safe walking and biking environment on 65th.

You have an opportunity to tell the city that we need to take the safety of our most vulnerable road users seriously during an open house 6 – 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Roosevelt High School. SDOT staff will provide updates on their NE 65th safety project and take public feedback. Please attend, and/or fill out the survey (launching tomorrow, stay tuned) to let the city know that you support bold safety improvements to NE 65th.

The history of this process has been both tragic and frustrating. Seattle’s Department of Transportation (SDOT) has never been responsive to requests for safety improvements on 65th, despite years of asking. When Andy Hulslander was killed biking home from work in 2015, neighbors were told that SDOT was studying improvements. However, not a single change was made to the corridor. (more…)

tags: #Fix65th, andres salomon, ne 65th, ravenna, roosevelt

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Governor vetoes delayed rollout of distracted driving law: ‘We can’t wait that long’

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

May 17, 2017

The moment Governor Inslee told bill supporters he would veto the rollout delay. Image from a video by the Governor’s Office.

In three months, it will finally be illegal to flip through Facebook or watch Netflix on your phone while driving a car in Washington State.

Though Washington was among the first state’s to ban texting while driving, the state has been slow to update it’s laws to outlaw other mobile device uses as the technology evolved beyond just text messaging.

It took several years of failed bipartisan efforts (House Democrats killed a similar bill in 2015 after Republicans passed it in the Senate) before the legislature finally passed SSB 5289 (PDF) this session to outlaw using a “personal electronic device” while driving. This includes holding the phone at all while talking (you can no longer just hold it in front of your face, which was actually legal before), watching video (this was also somehow legal until now), and using your finger to do anything more than activate a function on a device (so you can still answer a call on speaker, for example, or skip a song on Pandora).

Before signing the bill into law Tuesday, Governor Jay Inslee struck a provision that would have delayed the law’s effects until January 2019.

“We can’t wait that long,” he said, surprising the bill’s supporters and eliciting a round of applause. It was a moment of truly great leadership from Governor Inslee. Because he’s right. There’s no reason why people need another year and a half of streaming Netflix while driving. (more…)

tags: 2017 legislature, ann rivers, bob hasegawa, distracted driving, jay inslee, jessyn farrell

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Panel of experts will discuss solutions to bike theft

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

May 16, 2017

Graph from a Bicycle Security Advocates presentation to the Seattle City Council.

Bike theft continues to rise steeply in Seattle. And that not only costs people money, but many people won’t replace their stolen wheels. At a time when our increasingly congested city needs more people to get around by bike, theft is a growing impediment.

Brock Howell’ Bicycle Security Advocates group has put together a presentation for the City Council’s Transportation Committee meeting 2 p.m. today (Tuesday) and will host a public panel discussion 6:30 – 8 p.m. this evening at Métier on Capitol Hill.

The basic question: What can we do to stop the rise in thefts?

More details from Bicycle Security Advocates: (more…)

tags: bike index, bike thefts, brock howell, transportation committee

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Cascade: Redmond stations are a chance to go all out on Sound Transit station access

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

May 15, 2017

Transit works better when people can get to the stations.

This might seem like an extremely obvious point, but many of the region’s biggest rail and express bus stations have awful walking and biking access problems. Like truly awful:

It’s incredible how many people navigate 520 freeway hell every day to use these vital express bus stops in Montlake. Image from Google Maps.

And it’s a lot harder to go back and fix station access problems once the core issues have been baked into the planning process.

That’s why Cascade Bicycle Club’s East King County Policy Manager Vicky Clarke has put out an action alert calling for people hopeful for great light rail stations in Redmond to get engaged now. Sound Transit is hosting an open house 5 – 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center.

Specifically, Cascade is pushing for these station options:

Cascade supports an at-grade station at SE Redmond, and an elevated station at Downtown Redmond. This configuration promotes safety by minimizing at-grade road crossings, is the most cost effective alignment, and will enable King County to build a trail connection from the East Lake Sammamish Trail to the Redmond Central Connector, during construction of light rail.

This early process will guide high-level decisions about rail alignment and station locations. Making the right choices now to prioritize biking and walking access is far better than trying to tack on biking and walking improvements later.

More details from Cascade: (more…)

tags: cascade bicycle club, redmond, sound transit, st3, vicky clarke

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Seattle’s top bike commuting workplaces are all within 5 blocks of a protected bike lane or trail

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

May 11, 2017

New analysis from Commute Seattle found that the city’s large workplaces (100+ employees) with the highest bike commute rates all are within five blocks of a protected bike lane or trail and offer secure bike parking.

Even more telling: The top seven workplaces were all within one block of a trail or protected bike lane. And the gap between these workplaces and the citywide bike commute average is astounding.

The Allen Institute tops the list with more than one in five employees biking to work. If every Seattle workplace had a bike commute rate as high as the Allen Institute, there would be 117,000 people biking to work every day in our city.

This in not pie-in-the-sky dreaming here. These are actual major employers getting huge bike commute rates today. And the path to building on these successes is clear: Build more safe and connected bike routes between more homes and workplaces.

And we should start by building the downtown Basic Bike Network now. The top seven workplaces are all on or connected to the Fremont Bridge and Burke-Gilman Trail. Several of them are even at the north end of South Lake Union, which is served well by Dexter and Westlake. But the lack of safe connections from the south end of Lake Union into downtown is holding back all the other center city workplaces.

There is a lot of pent-up demand waiting for a good bike lane network. With center city traffic only getting worse, a bike network is the fastest and cheapest way to provide people with another option for getting around. It’s also the fastest way to get major results. (more…)

tags: allen institute, basic bike network, commute seattle, downtown

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