Josh Feit is a longtime reporter, a co-founder of PubliCola News and now a writer for Sound Transit. But on Thursday, he’ll showcase a different kind of writing: urban design poetry.
Head to Good Weather Bicycle & Cafe in Capitol Hill’s Chophouse Row at 7 p.m. Thursday to hear Feit read from his new poetry collection The Night of Electric Bikes published by Finishing Line Press. There will also be music, according to the event listing: “Electronic artist Rob Joynes & vocalist Malia Seavey open with a set of transit pop covers.”
Book reviewer Paul Constant interviewed Feit about the collection for Poetry Northwest, which includes this quote: “The pro-city thing really resonates with me, because I want to push back against an idea that comes up a lot in poetry and in literature, which is this fetishizing of authenticity, and fetishizing the idyllic and simple and rustic and uncontaminated. There’s this kind of fascistic thing about the uncontaminated and the idea that we’re being ruined by cosmopolitanism and technology. I’m trying to push back against that and say, life is complicated. Life is not the beauty, life is the mishmash and the overlapping ideas.”
Construction on the first segment of the Beacon Hill bike lane (now called the Beacon Ave S & 15th Ave S Safety Project) is still scheduled to begin a year from now, and the project team has advanced design to the major 30% design milestone. This is the point where major designs elements are established, though there is still room for smaller adjustments before it is final.
The design is moving forward with one-way bike lanes on each side of 15th Avenue S and Beacon Avenue S from the Jose Rizal Bridge to S Spokane Street. The bike lanes will also be protected using a concrete curb. The bike lanes will be as skinny as 4.5 feet plus space for the barrier in the most constrained sections of 15th Ave S, which is an issue we explored in depth in a previous post. Each general traffic lane will be 10 feet wide in these constrained sections, so this isn’t a matter of designers short-changing the bike lane. It’s just a constraint.
This constrained street width is also why there is no space for on-street parking on 15th Ave S, a significant point of contention. In response, SDOT has been scouring the area to find ways to increase parking availability on nearby streets. They are even going as far as deleting part of a skinny paint-only bike lane on 14th Ave S between S Grand St and S Plum St to add parking there. The added parking will reduce the roadway width, which slows traffic speeds, and SDOT will also add some speed humps to further reduce speeds and make the mixed traffic lanes safer for those biking there or heading to the nearby elementary school.
From SDOT’s 2018 School Bike Parking Inventory Analysis (PDF).
Lucas Salm-Rojo, a junior at Ballard High School, wrote an excellent op-ed for the Seattle Times this week arguing that Seattle Public Schools is making it harder for students to bike to school because not every school has adequate — or any — bike parking. And the problem is particularly apparent at at schools serving communities of color.
While locking a cheap kids’ bike to a random fence might not be a big deal in elementary school, the problem becomes a bigger deal once kids grow and start riding more theft-worthy adult bikes. A student’s bike is probably among their most valuable possessions, so you can understand them not wanting to lock it up to a random street sign outside school all day every day.
The full story is a must-read:
When I was younger, I never thought too deeply about where I parked my bike. In elementary school I locked my bike to the chain-link fence that surrounded the building. Now that I am older and the bike I ride is more expensive than the 20-inch kids bike my dad bought off Craigslist, I am more invested in not having it get stolen. In a 2019 survey conducted by the Seattle Department of Transportation, 45% of respondents said that biking to school was not an option, citing a lack of bike racks and a worry of theft, both of which are issues I have encountered.
Seattle municipal code requires schools to provide four bike parking spots per classroom. However, a 2018 study by SDOT found that at least two-thirds of Seattle public schools don’t meet those requirements, and three schools — Franklin High School, Emerson Elementary and Van Asselt Elementary — didn’t just not meet the code, but had no bike racks at all. I have a friend who goes to Franklin and is forced to rent a bike locker at the nearby Mount Baker light-rail station.
This lack of bike racks is also concerning because it ties into the racial inequalities that are often found in any type of infrastructure in this city. SDOT’s study found that the number of bike racks a school has can be tied to the number of students from that school who live in a community of color. It found that the more diverse a school’s student body is, the fewer bike racks it has. This is concerning because students of color are already less likely to walk or bike to school than their white counterparts.
The other day my kid and I were biking the same route we bike every day on the way to preschool when something amazing happened: Part of the route had brand new bike lanes.
We knew bike lanes were coming at some point, but it was still a wonderful surprise the day it happened. For a couple blocks, including a sometimes stressful uphill section between Olive Way and Pine Street, we no longer needed to ride with cars in mixed traffic on Melrose Avenue. It’s was a glorious feeling.
The new bike lanes are part of the long-stewing, community-generated Melrose Promenade project. Many community members have been working with the city, winning grants and hosting an enormous amount of community outreach for more than a decade. I remember this being a day-one priority during the initial meeting of Central Seattle Greenways in February 2012. Initially billed as an effort to celebrate “Capitol Hill’s front porch,” the project is an attempt to improve the walking and biking environment on this key route, which includes a connection to Lakeview Boulevard to the north and First Hill to the south, while also making it more enjoyable for the community to actually hang out on the street. Sure, the roar of the freeway is a bummer, but the views from the street between Denny and E Roy Street are great.
In response to the surge of letters they received from people concerned about Seattle’s plan to permanently route the waterfront bike path across Alaskan Way and back again near the Pier 66 cruise terminal, the Port of Seattle said it supports a trail on the west side of Alaskan Way so long as it can be detoured during busy cruise loading hours.
Seattle Neighborhood Greenways put out an action alert earlier this month calling on people to write the Seattle Port Commission and urge them to support a “seamless” waterfront trail. All five Seattle Port Commissioners signed a response letter saying “the Port supports a continuous, dedicated, west side bike trail. The key element of this design for the Port is a temporary detour for cyclists to an east side bike trail while cruise ships are loading and unloading.” The Commissioners also state that they support the city’s plan for a larger traffic safety redesign of the street. “The Port also supports the city’s lane reductions in this corridor beyond the cruise terminal activity center to reduce vehicle traffic volumes and speed, which will also increase safety for all.”
So far, the city has yet to release a trail design that meets the Port’s and trail advocates’ requests. The most recent design available on the project website still shows the trail crossing the street twice within a couple blocks, which would add significant delay for trail users and make the experience less intuitive. It would likely also lead many trail users to simply ride on the sidewalk or in the street instead of using the trail, defeating the purpose of the project.
Bike Everywhere Day is Friday, and people and organizations will be hosting Celebration Stations all over the place to cheer on anyone riding a bike and maybe give out some coffee, snacks or swag.
If you work a 9 to 5 job, I highly suggest getting an early start so you can visit some stations along the way. And if you don’t work Friday morning, getting up early and riding to as many stations as you can is a pretty fun way to start the day. And if you word early, there are also a number of stations open in the afternoon as well as several evening events. So before visiting a station on Cascade Bicycle Club’s map, select it to see its scheduled hours. In general, Green=Morning, Red=Evening and Purple=All Day.
