In an obvious handout to the lucrative “notice of bike lane closure” sign-making industry, Seattle now requires 72 hours of advance notice before closing a bike lane or neighborhood greenway for construction.
This is obviously not a complete solution to the problem of bike lanes suddenly ending, requiring often stressful merges into lanes mixed with motor vehicles. But at least you should have some warning now if a bike lane you depend on daily is going to close soon. And that’s something.
We’re still waiting for better rules requiring construction work to provide temporary biking and walking paths of comparable comfort and directness. It is simply not acceptable that people walking and biking should have to assume added personal danger in order to accommodate a construction project for someone else’s profit. Inconvenience is acceptable because this is a city and that happens. But danger is not OK.
That’s the principle behind this graphic we put together two years ago using Streetmix showing the order that lanes should be closed for construction: (more…)