If forecasts hold out, it may not be so chilly for Sunday’s Chilly Hilly. Cascade Bicycle Club’s first big ride of the year, this ride around hilly Bainbridge Island starts with an iconic ferry ride filled with bikes.
It’s also one of the few Cascade rides where you can register at the start line. Although the ride is a celebration of biking in rainy cold weather, participation numbers tend to spike when the event stumbles on nice weather.
Show up at Pyramid Alehouse (1st Ave across from Safeco Field) between 7 – 10 a.m. Sunday. Registration costs $40 and includes your ferry trip and food at a stop at Battle Point Park. If you are already on the west side of Elliott Bay, you can skip the ferry and start at B.I. Cycle Shop in Winslow for $30.
Seattle has some of the world’s most stunning car parking spaces.
There are half a million on-street parking spaces in Seattle, and almost all of them are completely free to use. That’s 60 million square feet of city land, or 1,378 acres. And that’s not counting all the parking lots, parking garages or home driveways and garages. Sightline estimates that between 10 and 20 percent of the total land in Pacific Northwest cities is dedicated to parking cars.
City land is very valuable, and there is actually no such thing as “free parking.” We all pay to maintain these millions of square feet of city-owned parking space whether we drive cars or not. There are 2.2 parking spaces per car in the region, which means by Sightline’s measures the average value of the space reserved for parking a car (~ $11,000) is thousands of dollars higher than the value of the average car itself (~ $8,000).
Of course, the city does need parking. Short-term parking and loading zones allow many customers to access businesses and for workers to deliver goods. The transit system does not serve all homes in the region well, and Puget Sound cities are not nearly compact enough for everyone to be within an easy walk or bike ride. For a wide variety of reasons (many of them due to purposeful car-centric community planning decisions), driving is simply the mode of transportation that makes the most sense for a lot of people’s lives.
But Seattle has far too much parking. And contrary to what you may have seen on King 5 or in the Seattle Times this week, even busy downtown has way more parking than people can even use. In addition to all the on-street parking, there are more than 50 parking garages in just the center city area. On a typical day, as many as 40 percent of the spaces in these garages are open.
Don’t believe me? Look for yourself. The city tracks live-updated totals for open spaces in just a small number of these center city parking garages. Here’s how many spaces were open at 10:30 a.m. on a Thursday: (more…)
A road diet, rechannelization, safe streets redesign, complete streets project or whatever you want to call it: It works.
Troy Heerwagen has created an excellent interactive infographic over at his Walking in Seattle blog that shows how consistently effective Seattle’s long history with low-cost safe streets redesigns has been. Many of our city streets were overbuilt during a 20th Century era of road engineering that put the high speed movement of cars above safety for people. Often, this manifested in the form of streets with too many lanes and/or lanes that are too wide, both of which lead to speeding and increased likelihood for injury and death. Four lane roads might work on a rural highway, but they don’t work in urban neighborhoods.
As Seattle works towards Vision Zero, we are going to need hundreds more miles of these redesigns. So it’s great that the city already has so much experience to build on.
Seattle was among the first cities in the nation to figure out that the same number of vehicles could travel on a much safer, less stressful three-lane street (one lane in each direction with a center turn lane) and has been redesigning streets in this style since the 70s. As time goes on, their designs have improved and most often now include better crosswalks and bike lanes, creating a more complete street. (more…)
As we reported previously, the city is about to start work on the first phase of the Central Area Greenway, running from Jackson to John along 25th and 22nd Avenues. Well, we thought we should expand on our suggestion for a bike connection on E Cherry Street to fill a safety gap in the interim greenway detour.
The planned greenway crossing of 23rd Ave at E Columbia Street will not be complete for about a year and a half after the city completes work on this neighborhood greenway. During that time, people will be detoured from 22nd Ave to 25th Ave via E Cherry Street. Today, that section of street looks like this:
That’s Garfield Community Center on the left, Coyote Central and Central Space on the right.
This is not a very busy street (8,300 vehicles per day), yet it effectively has five lanes at the intersection with 23rd (people use the parking lane as a right turn lane). This creates an unnecessarily dangerous and uncomfortable experience for people biking and walking. And if you are driving, all those extra lanes disappear at 25th and 22nd anyway, forcing you to merge right back into one lane in each direction.
The city should give the street a safe streets redesign with protected or buffered bike lanes in order to provide a safer temporary greenway route and fix an unnecessarily dangerous and inconsistent street that runs next to a community center, two high schools (the NOVA alternative school will soon return to a renovated building at 24th/Cherry), a community swimming pool and a youth programs center. The Bike Master Plan calls for the city to fill this bike lane gap, and there’s no better time to do it than now.
We threw together this quick sketch using Streetmix to demonstrate what Cherry could look like. At minimum, this could run just between 21st and 25th, though I could also see it running east to MLK and beyond: (more…)
This video letter from Peddler Brewing co-owner Haley Woods to city leaders about the terrible state of walking and biking on the Ballard Bridge is funny, strange and yet very serious. The tiny sidewalks further encroached by concrete pillars, the shin-high tripping ledge and the terrible bridge-end connections are completely unacceptable, especially for such a fast-growing urban hub like Ballard.
Well, don’t take my word for it. Watch the video:
As we reported previously, the city quietly released a report last year outlining some rough cost estimates for various sidewalk-widening options. None of the options stand out as a slam dunk as studied. The cheaper options are not all that cheap and would provide only small improvements. The more complete options were estimated to cost a gigantic sum ($20-48 million depending on various factors and options). But the report is at least a starting point to finding solutions. (more…)
Writu Kakshapati, family friend of Sandhya Khadka, speaks about the terrible loss Khadka’s family has felt.
Sandhya Khadka dreamed big. She believed in equality, especially equality for women, and she was dedicated to do something about it.
“There are people you remember for long after they are gone. Sandhya was one of those,” said family friend Writu Kakshapati. Kakshapati was speaking to a crowd gathered last week to hear about the city’s plans to end traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030.
In fact, she was speaking on what would have been Sandhya’s 18th birthday. But instead, Sandhya was killed in April while crossing 5th Ave NE to catch the 41 bus so she could get to class at North Seattle Community College.
“We mush make an effort that we don’t lose another life like that, not on our streets.”
Sandhya was one of 15 people killed in traffic last year on Seattle streets. 3,449 collisions resulted in injuries. That’s part of a downward trend in traffic violence that makes Seattle one of the safest big cities in the country.
But we lost Sandhya and all of the great things she was going to do with her life. That loss is immense to her family (she was an only child and an only grandchild), and it did not need to happen. Hundreds of people were seriously injured, many left with injuries that will forever change their lives.
Vision Zero says that serious traffic collisions are preventable, and no death or serious injury is acceptable. After all, it is hard to learn about Sandhya’s life and still feel good about 15 traffic deaths in just one year.
“I’ve met parents, spouses and children whose lives have been upended by traffic collisions,” Mayor Ed Murray told the crowd gathered in front of Lake City Library. He also told a personal story about when someone driving struck him when he was a child. He was in the hospital for a long time as he recovered from the collision.
“To this day, I suffer the fallout,” he said. “I remember the anguish my parents went through week after week at the hospital … That’s what this is all about.”
“If there’s any city in our country that can achieve [Vision Zero], I think it’s Seattle,” said SDOT Director Scott Kubly. He believes Seattle can reach zero deaths and serious injuries in traffic by 2030. It’s an extremely ambitious goal, and no large city has reached it since the dawn of the automobile. (more…)
If forecasts hold out, it may not be so chilly for Sunday’s Chilly Hilly. Cascade Bicycle Club’s first big ride of the year, this ride around hilly Bainbridge Island starts with an iconic ferry ride filled with bikes.
