Tonight, you can drink beer, win prizes and save a Seattle family bike shop all the at the same time.
How? Join Peddler Brewing, Seattle Bike Blog and Familybike Seattle from 5–10 p.m. at Peddler Brewing Company for a fundraiser for G&O Family Cyclery, which was severely damaged in the Greenwood explosion last week.
Peddler has been incredible, offering to donate half the price of each pint of beer to G&O. Cycle Dogs will also be there donating 100 percent of profits. You will also have a chance to enter a fundraiser to win some excellent prizes, including entries to Cascade Bicycle rides, product from Swift Industries, product from several G&O suppliers, books, swag, wine and much more.
The G&O online fundraiser is less than $10,000 from its goal of $45,000 as of press time. Let’s get there tonight for G&O can focus on their efforts to reopen bigger and better than ever.
The Seattle City Council will decide the fate of Pronto Cycle Share during their 2 p.m. today (Monday).
Seattle Bike Blog will be there with live coverage, so be sure to check back or follow along on Twitter: @SeaBikeBlog. You can watch live online via Seattle Channel.
We have written about the Pronto situation many times in recent months. For background, I suggest you read through those posts.
The Sustainability and Transportation Committee passed the Pronto buyout plan with Council a oversight amendment 4 (O’Brien, Sawant, Johnson, Juarez) – 2 (Burgess, Herbold).
Pronto’s Lead Technician Grant Kahl inspects a kiosk.
When you go to check out a Pronto Cycle Share bike, you probably only see the bikes and docks. You beep a bike with your key fob or swipe your credit card at a kiosk and a bike unlocks. You ride it to the station closest to your destination, push it into the dock and “beep,” it locks and disappears back into the bike share system.
You walk away as though you didn’t ride a bike at all. You don’t need to return it to where you started, and you don’t need to worry about it being stolen. You don’t need to fix a flat tire or take it in for a tune-up. When you decide you want to bike again, a working bike will be waiting for you.
But this doesn’t happen by magic. It takes a team of smart people working behind the scenes for system operator Motivate to keep Pronto so safe and easy. As the Seattle City Council prepares to vote Monday on whether to buy the system, the debate has largely ignored the value of the trained and inventive staff working every day to get better and better at running a bike share system uniquely designed for Seattle.
The Council will vote during their 2 p.m. meeting Monday, and you can testify to support the buyout plan at the start of the meeting (sign up before the start of the meeting). Under the plan, the City would buy the system, and Motivate would continue operating the system while the city requests bids for an expansion (presumably, Motivate will be among the companies bidding on the contract). (more…)
NOTE: G&O Family Cyclery is not only a Seattle Bike Blog advertiser, but co-owner Davey Oil is a close friend. He even officiated my wedding (and was amazing). I note this for disclosure, but also to emphasize that this shop is very special. I can’t wait to see it back open better than ever.
Photo of the old shop shortly after the explosion, from Davey Oil. The building was structurally damaged and has since been torn down.
G&O Family Cyclery is more than a store.
G&O is bike infrastructure as much as a bike lane. It’s a resource where people can try out and purchase bikes that do more, bikes that can replace a minivan.
But early Wednesday, a major gas leak ignited in a dramatic blast. Mr Gyros, Neptune Coffee and the Quick Stop corner store were leveled completely. And though photos show the G&O storefront directly adjacent to Neptune Coffee still standing, co-owner Davey Oil said the shop has also been destroyed.
“Our status right now is looking for where we can go,” he said. The shop is closed for the now, but Davey and co-owner Tyler Gillies are not giving up. And judging by the huge outpouring of help, the Greenwood and family biking communities aren’t giving up either.
An effort to raise money to support the shop’s incredible staff and invest in reopening in a new space passed the $15,000 mark in just 18 hours with 192 people donating to the cause as of press time. You can help them reach their goal by donating online or mailing a check. More details here.
“I’m not interested in closing, I’m not interested in giving up at all,” said Davey. And especially after going through this challenge together, he’s also dedicated to the Greenwood neighborhood.
“The people of Greeenwood have been amazing,” he said. “I want to stay here” to keep serving the neighborhood as their local bike shop and to keep introducing people to the power of family biking, but also “to fix everybody’s stroller wheels.”
Sharrow on NE 45th Street in the U District. Image: Google Street View
Seattle’s unofficial motto could easily be “The City of the Sharrow.” Keegan Hamilton at the Seattle Weekly once suggested the Seattle Sharrows as a name for a D-League basketball team.
And sure, why not? Take one glance at major streets in all corners of the city, and you’re bound to see two chevrons with a bicycle icon beneath it. The sharrow is the city’s most prolific graffiti tag.
There’s a reason I used the color-inverted sharrow as the logo for this blog (other than the free public use rights and a vague allusion to me writing with ink versus the city’s white road paint). In some ways, this simple icon tells the story of biking in Seattle perfectly: We’re a city that wants so badly to appear to be trying to make cycling safer and more accessible, but is so scared of actually making a significant change to roadway design that might upset anyone, that we have to-date painted well over 3,000 of these markings.
92 miles of the city’s claimed bicycle network consists of “shared lane markings.” These 92 miles are why you could be fooled looking at the official Seattle Bike Map into thinking the city’s bike network is fairly complete and connected. Of course when you actually get out on the streets, you encounter roads like NE 45th Street pictured above (and noted as a bike route on the bike map). Yeah, no.
Well, initial findings from a recent study out of CU Denver suggest that shared lane markings have had either no impact on biking rates and biking safety or may even have a negative impact. These results still need peer review, but they likely are not surprising to anyone who has found them of little help on major busy streets.
Seattle’s Josh Cohen has produced a great report for his most recent podcast at The Bicycle Story. Cohen not only spoke with one of the study’s authors, Wes Marshall, but he also tracked down James Mackay, a bike planner who invented the sharrow for the City of Denver in the 90s and helped get the marking into the national traffic design standards.
“Bikes almost became extinct in America, so it’s sort of like reintroducing them,” Mackay told Cohen. And the sharrow was invented for the reason you might expect: City leaders wanted to do something for biking without impacting general purpose or parking lanes. In a way, they were just to officially communicate that bikes do have a legal right to be on a street and should be expected there.
“The evolution of sharrows over the last two decades parallels the evolution of biking as transportation in America over the same period,” Cohen concludes, “they were [created] in an America that saw bikes as exercise equipment and children’s play things. (more…)
Major work to repave Roosevelt Way and rebuild it with transit, biking and walking improvements starts March 14, SDOT says.
The major repaving project is expected to take at least until September before the whole length from NE 65th Street to the south end of the University Bridge is completed.
Work will happen in phases starting at the north end from NE 65th to Ravenna Blvd. Expect detours and delays. Most significantly, three weekends will require full closures of the U Bridge. We will attempt to keep on top of these closures so you can plan accordingly.
Zone E work, which covers the U Bridge, can happen at any time during the construction process, but the other zones should not have overlapping work. This may be a lesson learned from the 23rd Ave project underway currently in the Central District.
As we reported previously, the plan for the bike lane on Roosevelt appears to be a big improvement from the existing paint-only door zone bike lane. But several major intersections will not get the fully-separated treatment, requiring users to mix with turning cars.
Along with the under construction Westlake Bikeway, the Roosevelt project is one of the most significant projects for bike access and safety on tap for 2016. (more…)
Tonight, you can drink beer, win prizes and save a Seattle family bike shop all the at the same time.
