As we reported yesterday, the Great Bike Route Wall of Uptown/Lower Queen Anne has finally cracked with the opening of the new protected bikeway on Mercer Street under Aurora.
But the bike lanes are just a small part of a $237 million car-focused remake of the Mercer corridor. It’s got lots of wide lanes and long traffic signal cycles. It is uncomfortable to be around if you not in a car, and it is choked with car traffic. It fails as a people-focused, economy-pumping street, and it fails as a fast-moving, highway-style road. It’s a stroad. A really big and really expensive one.
Though having the ability to cross Aurora is amazing and game-changing for bikeability in the area, the execution of the bike route connections range from OK to terrible. And as we will outline below, the failures were nearly all brought up by the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board back in the planning phase then promptly ignored.
The first thing most people will notice is that the lanes are extremely green. In a way, it’s kind of exciting to see so much green. It screams out, “Look! You can bike here now!”
But the city usually uses green to highlight conflict points and driveways, and the exact opposite is true with this lane. The green disappears at every intersection, where people biking, walking and driving mix together. This sign highlights the confusion (it also only shows a one-way bike lane):
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