The short but important trail connection between the Rainier Valley Neighborhood Greenway and the I-90 Trail is open, and Hanoch at Best Side Cycling took it for a test ride.
As we noted in July, this short little trail at the end of 28th Ave S has been a long time coming. It never should have been this difficult or taken this long, but SDOT and WSDOT finally figured out a solution to make it happen. This will make it much more intuitive and feasible for people to use this greenway route, which first opened in 2017.
There are still some details still left to be finished, but the trail is open for use.
Folks, support your local bike shops. These are rough times for a lot of them, and competition from online direct-to-customer companies is not slowing down. Sure, you might be able to save some bucks buying online, but that website won’t be there to help you fix it on your way to work or wherever. Supporting your local bike shop is supporting vital bike infrastructure. The experts behind the workbench stocked with all the right tools, they can’t be replaced by any online service.
The locally-owned Pedego Seattle electric bike shop in Ballard will close August 31, the company announced Monday. In a statement, the company said owner Mike Nelson “attributed the store’s closing to personal hardship as well as economic factors driving the ebike industry toward a commodity model, where high-touch white-glove service and the best warranty in the industry matter less than low prices.” Nelson’s first shop opened in Redmond in 2017, and he opened the Ballard location the next year. The Redmond shop was shuttered in 2022. Seattle Bike Blog wishes Nelson and all the Pedego staff the best. The shop’s sale is already on, so head down to their location on Market Street near 26th Ave NW to say goodbye and pick up some deals.
Mainstream bike shops were slow to pick up on the e-bike trend, though they are catching up. But them being slow created lots of space for non-traditional bike sales models, including direct-to-customer discount companies that undercut competitors in part by bypassing the standard retail markup at a local shop. The problem is that bikes require maintenance, and those local shops are lifelines for bike owners. Shops aren’t grifting when they earn money on a sale, they are funding their essential work. And a shop’s warranty, including their warranty on service, is absolutely worth any extra cost in my opinion.
Scooter share company Bird has quietly launched new shared e-bikes in Seattle in addition to their fleet of scooters, so of course I had to hunt one down and take it for a ride.
The company’s pedal-assist e-bikes are the first direct competitor to Lime since Lime took over JUMP in 2020. Veo also has “bikes” in operation in Seattle, but they are more like throttle-controlled scooters with mostly useless pedals. Bird’s bikes, which the company first introduced in 2021, are much more like the now-familiar Lime bikes. They cost $1 to unlock plus 39¢ per minute, which is 8¢ less per minute than Lime’s bikes as of press time. Note that the companies adjust these prices often.
After a few tries, I was able to ride a fully-functional bike, and it was great. It passed my downtown hill-climbing test, getting up and down the extremely steep blocks of Spring and Seneca Streets between 2nd and 4th Avenues. A bike that can handle these hills can handle any Seattle bike route.
The blue and black bikes have solid tires similar to those common on early private bike share bikes launched in Seattle back in 2017. These solid tires have the obvious benefit of reliability because they cannot go flat, but they do make the ride a bit bumpier than the more familiar tires filled with air that the Lime bikes use. The Bird bikes also have somewhat sluggish brakes, but they are good enough to stop the bike on a very steep downhill. The saddle height is adjustable using a dropper post handle, which is very easy, fast and intuitive.
Overall, the Bird bike is not quite as good as the Lime bike, which had the benefit of consuming JUMP’s many years of bike development. But the Bird bike is cheaper to ride, so the better Lime ride comes with a price premium. 8¢ per minute doesn’t sound like a lot of a price difference, but it adds up. If you ride for 30 minutes, the price difference is $2.40, about the cost of a transit fare. It will be interesting to see if Lime is forced to stop its ongoing price hikes now that they have a direct competitor.
I unfortunately missed this story before the 60-day comment period ended in late July, but as a parent of a brand new bike rider I gotta post my thoughts anyway.
There is an old Consumer Product and Safety Commission regulation that requires kids bikes to be sold with a coaster brake, and it is frankly nonsense. Makers of so-called “sidewalk bikes,” which the CPSC defines as bikes with a seat height no higher than 25 inches, must ship their bikes with a coaster brake even if they are designed to have perfectly capable handbrakes. Some bike makers have even resorted to shipping their bikes with three wheels: One for the front, one for the back, and one with a legally-required coaster brake hub that is intended to be thrown in the trash. This is not a great situation for many reasons.
This is why kids bike maker woom filed a request in 2022 to eliminate the requirement. From the rule change proposal summary:
The petition argues that this regulation for sidewalk bicycles is out of date. The petition asserts that it is “hard to compare the relative safety of bicycle braking between children’s bicycles with a combination of handbrakes and a footbrake to those with just handbrakes,” and alleges that there is no evidence that handbrakes are less safe than the required footbrakes—and may be safer than footbrakes. The request also asserts that manufacturers are producing and selling non-compliant children’s bicycles without footbrakes. The petition claims that footbrakes cost more to produce than handbrakes, putting manufacturers that comply with CPSC’s brake regulations at a competitive disadvantage to those who do not comply. The petition also states that European regulations do not require footbrakes for children’s bicycles.
My kid started by riding a balance bike, and her first pedal bike had hand brakes and no coaster brake. She never had any trouble operating the hand brakes. After riding for a while, we got her a new bike that was unfortunately just barely too big for her to ride comfortably. So we ended up borrowing a bike from a friend (thanks Lindsey!) that was a little smaller just so she’d have something to ride until she grew another inch or so. This borrowed bike had a coaster brake, and boy did it give my child trouble. The biggest problem with coaster brakes is that she had a lot more trouble getting the pedals into the “starting position” because she couldn’t move them backwards until they were in the right spot. This was very frustrating to her. Getting started is by far the most difficult part of learning to bike. It’s the final puzzle kids have to overcome before they are riding freely. Any impediment to getting their pedals in the starting position just makes learning to ride harder than it already is.
Despite reaching a settlement with a group of eight people who sued the City of Seattle in 2022 after they crashed and were injured while biking through the Ballard Missing Link, the city still has not made the treacherous railroad crossing under the Ballard Bridge “reasonably safe for ordinary travel,” according to a new set of claims from 10 additional people injured while biking there.
The new claims are a potential precursor to a lawsuit and were filed by the firms Washington Bike Law and Schroeter, Goldmark & Bender (Full disclosure: Washington Bike Law advertises on Seattle Bike Blog). For decades, people have been crashing while biking on these tracks that cross the poorly-maintained roadway near and directly under the Ballard Bridge. As part of a 2022 settlement, the city agreed to make design changes to the track crossing. However, the first phase of changes were widely panned, including by Seattle Bike Blog, for adding new potentially dangerous gravel pits that seem to be “baffling riders rather than helping them.” A second phase of changes is planned that will hopefully create a safer and more usable track crossing, and the press release from WBL and SGB notes that the city has until December 31 to complete this phase or the previous riders will be able to file another suit.
