Didn’t order your copy of Biking Uphill in the Rain soon enough to arrive by Christmas? No problem! You can order one from our online shop and select “Local pickup in U District/Wallingford” option during checkout. You can pick it up from my front porch any time. Also, local pickup is free.
Each copy sold in our online store also comes with a Seattle Bike Blog sticker. I’ve heard our stickers are is the most in-demand holiday items since Tickle Me Elmo. No, I will not cite my source on this fact.
Contains all the holiday classics* such as: Cassette the Halls! Ring Your Bells (When Passing). Biking Around the Christmas Tree. Silent Ride, Holey Tire. Grease Three Gears. I Saw Mommy Kissing Handlebars. Baby, Let’s Bike Outside. You’re a Mean One, Mr. Porsche. O Chamoisbalm.
* Biking Uphill in the Rain contains no holiday classics.
The design for the Alaskan Way bike lane has reached the 90% milestone, and the latest version is wider and better protected. As before, the bike lane is still on the waterfront side of the street to connect the Elliott Bay Trail in Myrtle Edwards Park to the in-construction bikeway that is part of the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Project. But the city responded to feedback from Cascade Bicycle Club, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and many of you, and the new design by widening much of the path to 12 feet and protecting the removable section with removable bollards.
Oh yes, if you are new to this project, you’re probably wondering what I mean by a “removable section.” This whole project was in jeopardy not so long ago due to concerns by the Port of Seattle that it would interfere with cruise ship loading and unloading at Pier 66. So the compromise is that the cruise terminal can detour the bike path to a path on the other side of the street during sailing days, then remove the bollards and allow loading in the bike lane space. During peak season, there are often 5 sailing days per week with far fewer during the off-season. Loading hours are often busiest between 6 a.m. and 4 p.m., so there is also potential to work commute hours into the bike lane closure plan. Those details are still being worked out. It’s a novel solution, and it will be interesting to see how it works out in practice. (UPDATED this paragraph to add sailing schedule info from a project Q&A and video presentation).
Here’s how SDOT describes the latest design changes:
Changes since 60% design:
Street-level protected bike lane in front of Pier 66 (west side of Alaskan Way from Blanchard St to Wall St) on non-sailing days
Upgraded traffic signal at Blanchard St (to full traffic signal for all directions at this intersection)
Widened segments of west side protected bike lanes from 10 feet to 12 feet
Updated plans for removable bollards in front of Pier 66
And though it is not part of this project, the privately-funded trail extension on the east side of the street should make the detour experience better.
Below is the updated design for when the bike lane is in place near Pier 66:
SDOT should no longer be able to make a significant road repair project without ensuring that at least one side of the street has a sidewalk and completing any necessary repairs. The City Council approved a new ordinance last week that will make sure SDOT no longer makes large street investments that ignore the adjacent sidewalks.
Seattle is missing about 11,000 blocks of sidewalk, and a 2018 study found 154,000 instances of sidewalk deficiencies in the city. To put the enormity of this sidewalk work in context, the ordinance includes this whopper of a whereas clause: “WHEREAS, at the current annual rate of new sidewalk construction (approximately 27 blocks per year over the course of the Move Seattle levy), it will take 407 years before all of Seattle streets have sidewalks;”
This is an overwhelming amount of work, and it’s going to take a lot of different strategies to make significant progress on the problem. This ordinance will only make a dent in the total, but every new block of sidewalk or repaired tree root heave is a big deal to the people who use them. We argued in September that now is the perfect time to pass this ordinance because it gives time for the authors of Seattle’s next transportation funding measure to price this sidewalk work into their cost estimates.
The new ordinance builds on the 2019 bike lane ordinance, which itself was crafted as a strengthening of the city’s existing complete streets ordinance. Both the bike lane and now sidewalk rules define a “major project” as one costing $1 million or more. Something to note here is that some bike lane projects may themselves cross the $1 million mark, triggering the sidewalk rule. So SDOT may need to update their per-mile cost estimates for bike lanes to account for this.
The bill does include wiggle room for the SDOT Director to declare a project exempt from this new rule if “the characteristics of the physical features or usage of a street, or financial constraints of full compliance prevent the incorporation or restoration of sidewalks or the demonstration of pedestrian and bicycle improvements.” So as with all new rules like this one, advocates and neighbors will need to keep an eye on the department’s work to make sure they are following the spirit of the law. Each year, the SDOT Director will need to present to the City Council explaining all the exemptions they plan to give to projects.
In response to concerns about the bikeway causing traffic and freight mobility issues, SDOT conducted a study. And the results are in: The trail increased weekday biking by 144%, weekend biking by 53% and walking by 90%. And this all happened while increasing travel times for cars and trucks by less than one second, a literal blink of an eye.
The thing is, these results should not be a surprise to us in 2023. We’ve done this song and dance for more than a decade now. Results like these happen every time the city completes a significant safety project on a fast and over-designed street like W Marginal Way. People worry that the project will increase traffic and complain loudly, unconvinced by assurances from SDOT’s staff that travel times will not increase significantly. Then the city completes the project and finds that, sure enough, SDOT staff was correct all along. It’s almost like the people SDOT has hired to design safer streets know what they’re doing. Here’s a likely non-exhaustive list followed by the date of the study (typically a year later):
I am writing this post from a subway train in New York City. Did you know it is possible to have more than one subway line? Wild! And when they connect to each other, you can take trains to a lot more places. Seattle should really give this a try.
I’m here for fun and not for work, and yet so far I have ridden a very old choo choo (a 91-year-old subway train rolled out for a “nostalgia ride”) and spent two hours in the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn. This is apparently what I do for fun.
By the way, the next time someone asks why it takes us so long to build subway lines these days, refer them to information about the working conditions for people building the early New York subway lines. You can build subway lines very quickly if you don’t mind killing a bunch of workers and damaging nearby structures.
I’ll be back late on Wednesday, so expect the blog to be back to full speed just in time for the holiday break.
Here’s some great local bike shop news: Mello Fellos (formerly known as Mobile Bike Repair) is opening a location in the Belltown/Denny Triangle space formerly home to Velo.
Mello Fellos/MBR has been operating out of a much smaller space near 9th and Stewart since 2012 while also hosting mobile repair services for bike commuters at major employers like Amazon and Fred Hutch.
“Since the closure of Velo, we’ve boomed,” said Jesse Angelo, who owns Mello Fellos along with Andy Graef. “It just made sense for us to move there. It’s already built as a bike shop.”
