Your ballot for the August 1 primary election should have arrived in the mail, or should arrive very soon. Eligible voters have until July 24 to register or update your address online. After that date, voters will need to register in person at a voting center.
Every Seattle City Council district seat is up for election this year, and the new Council will be tasked with sending voters a transportation funding measure in 2024. This is a very important election for steering the next decade of transportation policy and investment, so don’t snooze on it.
Want to know which candidates will (hopefully) be good for safe streets, bicycling and transit? Below is a roundup of endorsements from Washington Bikes (WB), Transportation for Washington (T4W), the Transit Riders Union (TRU), and The Urbanist (URB). Washington Bikes also published a Seattle City Council “candidate scorecard” based on responses to their candidate questionnaire if you want to get a quick idea of how candidates in your district stand on issues like bike lanes on arterial streets. The Urbanist also published candidate questionnaires they received. I will also include video of transportation-focused candidate forums if you want to hear candidates speak to these issues themselves.
UPDATE: An earlier version of this post left out WA Bikes endorsements beyond Seattle. I have added them below. I apologize for missing them.
Why do people ride Cascade Bicycle Club’s annual Seattle to Portland? There are going to be quite a few people asking themselves this exact question this weekend at some point during their 200-mile ride.
But every year, there are people riding for a specific cause, using the feat as a way to draw attention to an issue or raise funds. Of course the ride itself supports the bicycling and safe streets advocacy and education work by Cascade and Washington Bikes. But many people ride for causes unrelated, or only partially related, to bicycling.
Below are some of the causes people are riding for this year. Email a [email protected] to have yours added (include a short short description and any relevant links).
Click for video of the in-progress trail work from SDOT Director Greg Spotts.
The Rainier Valley Neighborhood Greenway opened in 2017 with a key piece missing: A connection the final block or so to the I-90 Trail in Sam Smith Park.
“One of the coolest ideas in the plan is the new connection to the I-90 Trail,” I wrote in a September 2015 post about the greenway plan. “This was one of the more difficult puzzles in the whole route. All the other connections from the trail to the planned greenway route have ridiculously steep hills.” But when the route opened, it dead ended at the park with no clear way to get to the trail without hopping a curb and biking up a grassy hill. It has been that way ever since.
The problem was not Seattle, it was WSDOT. Sam Smith Park is a freeway lid that WSDOT built above I-90 as part of that freeway project. Even though SDOT was paying for and building the trail link, which would improve the connectivity of the state’s trail, WSDOT wanted to charge SDOT perpetual annual rent of $24,000 per year, increasing with inflation. But as Ryan Packer reported in November, the city and state had finally found a way forward.
Once the connection is in place, the Rainer Valley Neighborhood Greenway will be much more useful. The winding and hilly route travels along side streets near Rainier Avenue S as best as is possible. Though it was intended to act as something of an alternative to taking Rainier Ave, it is not comparable. The greenway is far hillier and longer than Rainier, which cuts a relatively flat diagonal across the valley’s street grid. There are many destinations along Rainier that the greenway does not serve. As a Rainier Ave alternative, it fails.
However, if you think about it as its own thing, a meandering and comfortable route through the neighborhood’s side streets, it’s mostly great (aside from one extremely steep block of 38th Ave S in Columbia City that should not be part of a supposedly all ages and abilities route). Neighborhood greenways are best when they are creating their own paths rather than when they are used as an alternative to installing bike lanes on a street that needs them. They have the ability to connect homes, parks, schools and more in a different way than we are used to. In infrastructure terms, a neighborhood greenway is really just a coordinated series of street crossing improvements, traffic calming and signage. But in a city with streets as confusing and hilly as Seattle, it’s especially useful to have a bread crumb trail to follow because if you make one wrong turn you might end up having to scale a very steep block.
If you’ve never ridden this route I highly recommend it, especially once the I-90 Trail connection is in place. You can take it all the way from I-90 to Rainier Beach, passing many neighborhood parks along the way. One popular alternative to the steep Columbia City section is to take Letitia Ave S and 35th Ave S between S Charlestown St and S Ferdinand St. Letitia is a lovely little street.
Navigating a washed-out section of the Carbon River Road in Mount Rainier National Park in 2017.
People For Bikes, the national advocacy organization, has put out an action alert urging people to support a rule change that would give superintendents of National Parks “greater authority to allow the use of e-bikes wherever traditional bicycles are currently allowed.”
Many National Parks are typically already rather restrictive about bicycle access, so this rule change would not mean people could suddenly go e-biking wherever they want. Instead, it would allow e-bikes to be treated like a pedal bike “unless superintendents determined that restrictions or closures of certain areas were warranted after taking into consideration public health and safety, natural and cultural resource protection, and other management activities and objectives,” according to the official environmental assessment of the proposed rule change (PDF).
National Parks are very different from each other. Most people probably think first of the wilderness areas and geographic wonders, but some National Parks are within urban centers. It makes sense to put this level of decision in the hands of superintendents who are familiar with each individual park’s needs. Aside from some extreme exceptions (very technical mountain biking is a possible example), e-bikes fit in just fine with pedal-only bikes, especially Class 1 and Class 2 e-bikes. The new rule includes definitions for the different e-bike classes, so a superintendent could presumably ban Class 3 e-bikes (can be powered up to 27mph) but allow the more common Class 1 and 2 bikes (powered up to 20 mph).
You can submit a comment in support of the change by July 21 using this online form. People For Bikes wrote this sample language you can use or modify for your comment:
My family and I biked the new North Lake Washington Trail Loop Saturday, and it was amazing. It is an instant classic of a bike ride with wide appeal. I suspect it will supplant the always popular Seattle-to-Woodinville-and-back ride since riders can now complete the loop rather than backtrack on the Sammamish River and Burke-Gilman Trails. The Totem Lake Connector bridge was the final* major piece needed to make this trail loop fully functional, so the bridge opening celebration Saturday also felt like a celebration for this whole loop. (*As you will see in the photos below, the Eastrail crossing at 132nd Ave NE desperately needs a fix, but I still feel comfortable recommending the loop despite this problem spot.)
Of course, Seattle Bike Blog mostly focuses on bicycling for transportation, and these new trail opening connect many more homes and workplaces to a bike route that is faster, easier, safer, or all of the above.
But in this post, I am focusing on the recreational aspect because a major new loop of this significance is extremely rare. The ride it will widely replace (or, rather, build upon) has been a mainstay of trail riding in the area since the Sammamish River Trail and the Burke-Gilman Trail were connected in 1993. It’s a shade over 32 miles long, and Google Maps estimates a little over 600 feet in total climbing. For a bike ride loop of that length in this glacier-carved region, that’s just about as flat as you can get (I can’t think of a flatter trail loop, can you? Let us know in the comments below).
Map of the route recreated using Google Maps. Google does not yet have the Totem Lake Connector working, but you get the idea.
I suspect this loop will be many people’s first ever long bike ride, and they are going to love it. It’s got enough challenge to push people’s limits, but it is also peppered with parks, restaurants, breweries and wineries. So you could ride for 3 hours straight, or you could make a day of it and stop as often as desired. UW Station also serves as a fantastic start and end point, providing excellent regional transit access to this trail loop via both light rail and UW-bound bus routes.
The ride
We started our journey in the U District. Though the Burke-Gilman Trail is well-known, it was a really cool feeling to set out on this familiar trail knowing there were places ahead I had never been. I was also very excited to show my five-year-old some new areas and parks she has never seen.
The Decade of the Eastrail is coming into view. The buildout of this major regional rail-trail will reach a milestone moment Saturday afternoon when the Totem Lake Connector biking and walking bridge opens. The bridge is almost like the golden spike that, thanks to a number of other recent additions, will finally connect the Eastrail to the Sammamish River Trail and, therefore, the Burke-Gilman Trail.
This is so cool and the result of decades of work by innumerable people both inside and outside of politics as well as a myriad of different government agencies. As of Saturday, you will be able to ride a loop around the north end of Lake Washington almost without leaving a trail. The only non-trail segments will be the Montlake Bridge connection from 520 to the Burke-Gilman and a couple steep blocks of 108th Ave NE near the South Kirkland Park and Ride between the Eastrail and the 520 Trail via Northup Way. But even this small Kirkland gap will be made optional when the under-construction Eastrail to Northup Way connection is completed as soon as late summer. After that, riders will have the option to use the non-protected bike lanes on Northup for a less-steep climb up to the Eastrail.
Who else is riding the new trail loop around north Lake Washington this weekend? I feel like this ride needs a name. Post your suggestions in the comments.
Bridge opening celebration
The Totem Lake Connector biking and walking bridge officially opens Saturday afternoon. The celebration goes from 2–4 p.m., and the City of Kirkland will be coordinating an aerial photo in case you want to become famous. Eastrail Partners are also organizing a pair of rides to the bridge that both start at 2. One leaves from Wilmot Gateway Park in Woodinville and the other leaves from South Kirkland Park and Ride. Email [email protected] to RSVP for a ride.
Meet up in the center of the park at 7ish. Leave at 730. Every Thursday from now until forever rain or shine. Bikes, beers, illegal firepits, nachos, bottlerockets, timetraveling, lollygagging, mechanicals, good times.ShareMastodonTwitterFacebookRedditEmail
Celebrate the Buck Moon by adorning your bicycle with blinky & twinkly lights. It’s the height of summer – warm nights and easy riding with friends. Saturday July 20 Parking Lot at Mercer St &[…]
Meet up in the center of the park at 7ish. Leave at 730. Every Thursday from now until forever rain or shine. Bikes, beers, illegal firepits, nachos, bottlerockets, timetraveling, lollygagging, mechanicals, good times.ShareMastodonTwitterFacebookRedditEmail
Details from Seattle Parks: On scheduled weekends from May to September, a portion of Lake Washington Boulevard will be closed to motorized vehicles from 10 a.m. Saturday to 6 p.m. Sunday. “Seattle Parks and Recreation[…]
Details from Seattle Parks: On scheduled weekends from May to September, a portion of Lake Washington Boulevard will be closed to motorized vehicles from 10 a.m. Saturday to 6 p.m. Sunday. “Seattle Parks and Recreation[…]
