Seattle Bike Blog

Sound Transit says ‘No’ to cargo bikes on light rail, families push back

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

February 25, 2016

Nap time waits for no light rail bikes rule. Photo form Cranksgiving 2010 by Julian of totcycle.com

Nap time happens when nap time happens.

For families who get around town on larger kid-hauling bikes, transit can be a lifeline. Get trapped across town when the clouds open up? Nap time arrives with miles left to bike? Kids get cold? Running late and need to take a transit shortcut?

Unlike buses, which cannot hold most large bikes (like longtail or bakfiets-style bikes), Link light rail trains have space for large bikes, especially outside busy commute hours. So if there’s room on the train, it’s a great option for biking families. After all, rules allow four bikes per train car, two hanging and two standing. And a bike is a bike.

Or so I thought. But a recent Sound Transit blog post was unequivocal: No large bikes allowed. At all. Ever:

Bikes are welcome on Sound Transit trains and buses, but room is limited. It’s a safety thing. In an emergency evacuation, for example, the doors can’t be clogged with bicycles.

Because of that we’re letting our riders know we only have space for a certain number of bicycles. This is meant for the safety of all passengers. We also have restrictions on the types of bicycles you can bring on board. What you can bring are single-seat, two-wheel bicycles, including electric-assist bicycles.

What we cannot allow are oversized, cargo, tandem or fueled bicycles (including motorbikes and mopeds) and trailers.

(more…)

tags: cargo bikes, family biking, sound transit, totcycle

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How Pronto can become a beautiful public bike system by going bigger

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

February 24, 2016

Bike share is beautiful. Bicycles owned by the public, available to the public at any time for just a couple bucks. It’s a public bicycle transit system operating on a relatively shoestring budget. It’s not a system designed with hardcore cyclists in mind, it’s designed for everyone else.

Or at least it should be. With so much of our coverage of Pronto focusing on problems with management and reasons ridership fell short of projections, let’s look forward to what Pronto could be. Because while Seattle has a unique urban design and geographic challenges, bike share can open up neighborhoods and express transit to many more people if we invest to give it a real chance to succeed.

While there are many changes Seattle can make to help bike share succeed (like building the planned and funded Center City Bike Network or removing our rare adult helmet requirement), the shortest answer for why Pronto is operating over-budget is that it is just too small. With only 54 stations and 500 bikes split into two essentially distinct and even smaller systems, Pronto did not go big enough to pull a profit in its first year. This doesn’t mean we should throw in the towel, it means we should invest the money now that we should have invested at launch.

Both Portland and Vancouver, B.C. have learned from Seattle’s experience by planning bike share systems this year at a more appropriate scale for cities our size: BikeTown in Portland will launch with 1,000 smart bikes and 100 stations (though their bikes can be docked at any bike rack in the service area). Vancouver’s system will launch even bigger with 1,500 bikes at 150 stations.

Pronto, for comparison, has only 500 bikes and 54 stations, but only 42 of those stations form a centralized and connected network. As we have discussed before, that connected network mass is everything: (more…)

tags: pronto emerald city cycle share

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Seattle Neighborhood Greenways gets Federal award for safe streets work

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

February 22, 2016

Tuttle rocks a game of post-car mini-golf during Park(ing) Day 2013

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will recognize Seattle Neighborhood Greenways Director Cathy Tuttle with a Lifesavers Public Service Award. Yep, the Feds have noticed the work of this humble grassroots safe streets organization, organizing neighborhood-by-neighborhood to develop bike routes and safe streets that everyone can feel safe using regardless of age or ability.

“[This award] reflects the fact that not only are the changes we’re seeing on the West Coast happening at a higher rate, but it’s a national priority as well,” said Tuttle. She will receive the award along with Greg Raisman, who works on safe streets and neighborhood greenways at the Portland Bureau of Transportation.

Tuttle points to work at the Federal level to shift traffic engineering standards to embrace safer multimodal design and USDOT’s Safer People Safer Streets challenge as signs that grassroots work in cities like Seattle and Portland are starting to align with a national “cultural shift” away from just safer high-speed roadways to safer streets for everyone.

“NHTSA has long been concerned with keeping people safe on high speed, high capacity roads by engineering safer highways and demanding safer vehicles (the organization grew out of Ralph Nader’s work in the 1970s),” Tuttle said. “Engineers were put on this earth to solve problems. Through NHTSA-funded programs, they’ve done a terrific job at making safer highways and cars. NHTSA may be setting engineers a new range of problems to solve.” (more…)

tags: cathy tuttle, lifesavers public service award, nhtsa, seattle neighborhood greenways

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A sober look at Pronto’s finances ahead of Council meeting

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

February 18, 2016

Slide from February 19 presentation to Council (PDF), red markup mine.

The City of Seattle already cut checks in December and early 2016 totaling $305,000 to keep Pronto Cycle Share operational, Josh Feit at Publicola reports. This revelation will certainly be a topic of conversation during tomorrow’s 2 p.m. Transportation Committee meeting about the system.

These payments were included in a slide we published in late January, and looking back I now see that SDOT noted it as “street use funds already utilized.” But this line did not come up significantly during the Council meeting, and it’s budgeted as “revenue” in the bike share system’s budget which puts the presented bottom line in the black.

In other words, the proposed $1.4 million is a buyout, since the city is purchasing assets (and getting a good deal as you will see below). But the $305,000 is a bailout, a cash injection to keep the system afloat.

The use of these fees was authorized, SDOT’s Barbara Gray told Feit, because street use fees can be used for bike programming. But these funds should be properly located in the system’s figures so we get an accurate picture of the financial situation.

If you move the city’s street use fees out of “operating revenues,” then the “city owned” bottom line is more like -$110,497 instead of $129,503. (more…)

tags: barbara gray, city council, josh feit, nicole freedman, phyllis porter, pronto emerald city cycle share, publicola, scott kubly, sdot, transportation committee

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Seattle traffic deaths up in 2015, but serious injuries are down

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

February 18, 2016

These numbers “do not include those on limited access State Highways and Interstates within the city limits,” according to the city. Aurora is included north of the Battery Street Tunnel because this section is not limited access.

Twenty people died in Seattle traffic last year, up from 2014’s total of 17 and above the trend the city needs to achieve zero traffic deaths by 2030, one of the city’s Vision Zero goals.

Mayor Ed Murray did not mention bikes in his State of the City address. But he did mention traffic safety saying, “Last year, by launching Vision Zero, an innovative strategy driven by data and focused on eliminating traffic deaths, we reduced fatalities by 25 percent, reaching an all-time low for the city.” Sadly, the mayor’s numbers were not accurate.

“SDOT provided inaccurate information to the Mayor’s Office prior to the State of the City speech,” said SDOT Spokesperson Norm Mah. Traffic deaths actually increased 18 percent.

A full quarter of the entire year’s traffic deaths in all of Seattle happened in one collision: The Ride the Ducks tragedy on the Aurora Bridge.

If that horrifying wreck had not happened, the city would be ahead of the pace it needs to reach Vision Zero in the next decade and a half. But the wreck did happen. Victims are still working to heal and come to terms with life-altering injuries, and the Ducks are already back on the streets. (more…)

tags: deaths, ed murray, injuries, ride the ducks, vision zero

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Howell: As Seattle adds jobs, how are the new workers getting there?

By

Brock Howell

| Posted

February 17, 2016
Editor’s Note: Every year, we write about newly-released Census data on commute modes in Seattle and communities across the country. In this guest post, Brock Howell dives even deeper, analyzing just Seattle’s new commutes. What he finds has lessons for what the city is doing right and what we need to change in order to meet our long-term and mid-term goals.

As the fastest growing major city in America, Seattle faces significant transportation and land use challenges and opportunities.

In the last five years, 70,000 new people moved to the region and the city is planning for another 120,000 to move here by 2035. Given this enormous surge of people, I wanted to see how our new residents are getting around and what that might portend for the future of walking, biking and transit.

Each year the U.S. Census Bureau publishes the results of its annual American Community Survey (ACS), which among other things shows the ways workers say they commute (SOV = Single Occupancy Vehicle).

SOV = Single Occupancy Vehicle. Remaining commutes not listed include carpools, motorcycles, taxis, telecommuting.

The total rates, however, do not tell the story of the new workers. In order to do this, I analyzed the ACS data by applying all annual changes to commute mode shares strictly to the annual changes of the employment levels. Below are my twelve takeaways.
1. The number of workers who bike to work doubled in the past decade.
(more…)
tags: brock howell, census

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