The city’s new bike counters at various points along neighborhood greenways and trails across the city have dropped their first sets of data, and the numbers are interesting.
Notably, as NE Seattle Greenways pointed out, the Ballard neighborhood greenway on NW 58th is already seeing bike count number around 25 percent as high as those on the Fremont Bridge.
Below are the graphs for the seven newest counters for the month of January. The West Seattle and Fremont Bridges have interactive graphs online.
Image from a presentation to the City Council Transportation Committee
One of the most interesting upcoming projects for people on foot and bike in Seattle has not received much attention yet, but it could revolutionize the way people get to and from Yesler Terrace and First Hill.
The 10th Ave S Hill Climb is largely grant-funded and part of a street vacation deal with the city as part of the large-scale redevelopment of Yesler Terrace that is now underway. Construction on the hill climb is scheduled to begin this year.
When completed, the stairway and gradual ADA ramp will connect Yesler Terrace to Jackson Street, Little Saigon and the International District. It will also likely be a stunning place to hang out and enjoy the stunning view from the south side of a very steep part of First Hill.
Today, 10th Ave S does not go through, and very steep grades leave very few options for moving between Yesler Terrace and Jackson Street, especially if you are on a bike or have mobility issues. Here’s how the hill climb area looks today: (more…)
The Broadway Bikeway is getting so close to being paved all the way to Yesler, but it may not be fully opened until project work wraps up in May. This late opening is to avoid situations where people encounter unexpected closures due to continued construction, as has been a problem at the north end of bikeway.
From SDOT’s Paul Elliott:
The work may be completed earlier than this, but the contractor may have final work and repairs to do in the corridor. To ensure this work will not require intermittent closures, we believe it best to open the bikeway when all the work in the corridor is substantially complete.
Perhaps having the bikeway open by the start of Bike Month is a great goal to aim for. How cool would it be to cut the ribbon May 1? Once it opens, there will be a protected space to bike all the way from Yesler Way to Seattle Central Community College.
One place where the technically-closed bikeway is already being used a lot is at the under-construction Marion Street streetcar plaza. This is one of my favorite side benefits of the Broadway Bikeway: It provides a safe and easy connection between Columbia and Marion Streets. (more…)
A replacement highway is already planned on the waterfront. Do we even need the tunnel?
While we here at Seattle Bike Blog have been very much against the Highway 99 deep bore highway tunnel all along, it was mostly because it is too expensive for what we were going to get. Basically, by investing in transit, I-5 capacity and active transportation, we could tear down the viaduct and have no need for the highway tunnel, initially anticipated to cost $2 billion.
But while the boring machine to be named Bertha was to be the widest such machine ever constructed, I did not actually doubt the tunnel could be built. People have built some crazy things, after all.
But now the state has admitted that after traveling only 1,000 feet, Bertha is broken. The machine will not be able to move until at least summer, and I am not the only person who has lost faith in the machine’s ability to complete its journey. Right now, there is surface space to dig a hole down to the machine for repairs if needed, but what if it breaks down underneath the downtown core or the viaduct?
But even assuming Bertha is fixable and capable of continuing on its now-massively-over-budget journey, there is another recent revelation that should ease people’s fears about removing the viaduct without first digging the tunnel: The state already plans to build a surface highway on the waterfront, even if the tunnel is built. Once people get a look at how wide this surface highway is, any fears that there will not be enough space for cars should be eased: (more…)
Seattle Bicycle Collective owner JT Lawson in his new shop. (Photo: CHS, used with permission)
When Velo Bike Shop left it’s longtime home at 11th and Pine nearly one year ago, the shop was hoping to fill a need for a big bike shop in the rapidly-growing Denny Triangle area. But they left a void on Capitol Hill, one of the city’s bikiest neighborhoods.
Amazingly, that void largely remained until December, when Seattle Bicycle Collective quietly opened its doors at 12th and Pine. While not equipped to do the volume and have the stock that Velo did, Capitol Hill Seattle reports that SBC is taking a community-focused, hands-on direction.
It’s hard to believe, we’re not sure exactly why it happened, but Capitol Hill is in need of some more working bike mechanics. The void left by Velo’s departure last year dealt a blow to the needs of Capitol Hill’s biking masses. (more…)
A bill making its way through the US Congress would require every state to develop a complete streets policy for projects that receive Federal funding. That means road projects would need to consider all road users, including people on foot and bike.
Seattle already has such an ordinance, but not Washington State. Passing the Safe Streets Act of 2014 would be huge for a nation with far too many dangerous streets. For more on the bill, see this StreetsBlog USA story.
I have heard bike experts make a lot of claims about what bike infrastructure can do: produce new users, boost local economies, improve family health, and change people’s minds about whether biking is safe. But I’ve also heard them claim that it can’t do other things, like contribute to displacement or address our enduring inequality problem. (more…)
