It’s time for the Bike News Roundup! Or rather, we are long overdue for a Bike News Roundup. I got out of the groove on organizing the interesting bike and transportation related stories I read back in 2021 when, well, reading the news wasn’t very fun. I was working on my book, and the Bike News Roundup was one of the tasks that got cut. But that ends now! So here’s the first Bike News Roundup in two years.
First up, did you all catch Doc Wilson on Out & Back with Alison Mariella Désir on KCTS back in December?
It is the year 2023, and Seattle just opened a new highway through the dense and walkable Belltown neighborhood. For five years, there was no connection between Alaskan Way on the waterfront and Western Ave in Belltown, and traffic was working about at well as it ever does. But this month, Seattle opened a new highway connection, and the result is sadly predictable: a multi-lane traffic jam in the middle of a neighborhood.
In video I shot just a couple weeks ago, you can see what it was like before. And now it’s yet another multi-lane street that gets clogged up during busy times and encourages speeding and dangerous driving during the off-hours.
We did not need to do this. This was a choice. The new highway connection was enormously expensive, and for what? To fill this neighborhood street with idling cars and make it uncomfortable to cross the street? Are the people sitting in these cars enjoying this? Who won here? The oil companies?
The decision to create this neighborhood highway was made years ago. And frankly, everyone involved in pushing for this design should be ashamed. Seattle’s Office of the Waterfront made this timelapse over multiple years showing them tear down the highway that Seattleites wanted gone and replacing it with, well, a different highway. This is nothing to celebrate. This does active harm to our city, it works against our climate and traffic safety goals, and it makes Belltown a less pleasant place to live and work. Meanwhile, it seems that traffic volumes have dropped on nearby 1st Avenue due to this new Western highway. Why weren’t there plans to make 1st Avenue safer when traffic moved over to Western? The people shouldn’t need to beg for safe streets, it needs to be standard practice within our transportation agencies.
But it doesn’t need to stay this way. Just because a decade-old decision was bad doesn’t mean we have to live with it. I suggested before this project opened that we only open one of the lanes and see how things go, and I still think that’s a good idea. We know that the vast majority of traffic deaths and injuries on city streets happen on streets with more than one lane in the same direction, so why are we repeating that mistake again?
We also need the city and state to expedite road safety project on Western Ave beyond the Elliott Way highway project. This is a bike route, believe it or not. But it is also a street that people need to feel safe around.
The bike corral at the Sounders game last weekend was packed.
The long winter finally ended recently in Seattle, just in time for the year’s first heat wave. The sun is out, so biking energy is endless. Seattleites in sunlight are like sharks: they must keep biking in order to breathe.
Bike Everywhere Month is well underway, and the number of events is not slowing down. For example, Commute Seattle will convene a bunch of local agencies and organizations for Spin into Bike Month 4–6 p.m. today (May 11) on the east side of Sam Smith Park along the I-90 Trail. So perhaps your evening needs to take a little detour. What else are you going to do? Bike Happy Hour isn’t until 6 p.m. at Gas Works, so you can do both. You can sleep when it’s October.
Speaking of Commute Seattle, Tara Peters recently compiled a helpful list of local “Cycling Groups for Shared Identities” complete with info on how to join up.
You have already told SDOT to build a continuous waterfront trail between Myrtle Edwards Park and the new downtown waterfront, but city plans still show the trail crossing Alaskan Way twice in a matter of a couple blocks near the cruise ship terminal at Pier 66. Now Seattle Neighborhood Greenways has another action alert you can use to ask the Port of Seattle Commissioners to work with the city to create a seamless waterside trail that also works for the cruise terminal.
There is so much space on Alaskan Way to work with in this spot. While the cruise terminal can get busy and hectic when a ship is loading and unloading, we’re talking about a few hours on a set schedule throughout about half the year. That’s not a good reason to create what is essentially a year-round trail detour. The risk is that people will not bother following such a short detour, instead opting to ride in the street or on the sidewalk and defeating the entire purpose of this project. It will also add time to bike trips and make the experience less pleasant, a major concern since the public has invested a lot of money to remake this waterfront. If we can build a trail that passes in front of the ferry terminal, then we can do it for the cruise terminal, too. We’ve done all the spins and flips to build a waterfront trail, now we just need to stick the landing.
We can find a solution, whether than means setting up a temporary detour during busy hours or simply designing a trail that can exist safely during busy hours.
Hello there! Regular readers may notice that things look a little different around here.
The previous site design was a customized version of the 2010 WordPress default theme and, well, it has been out of date since about 2012. I’ve been mulling over this redesign for a while, but then a recent update completely broke the mobile version of the site beyond repair. So here it is, in all its beta glory.
The biggest benefits of the new design are that it is responsive, changing sizes dynamically to fit whatever screen you are using. This technology was a big deal a decade ago, and I’m very excited that it has finally arrived here. The new theme should also meet the latest accessibility standards (I will need to audit this once I’m done making changes). The theme is also based on the brand new Twenty Twenty-Three WordPress theme, which includes a major change in the may WordPress will function going forward. So if I can get the same longevity out of it as I did with the last one, I won’t need to change themes again until 2035.
But the biggest advantage of the new theme is that it is so much easier to change and adjust things on the fly. This is why I feel comfortably launching it in a beta state. I already have a to-do list of things to fix and adjust, but I would love your feedback as well. But even in this mid-construction state, it should already be more functional than the old site, especially on mobile devices.
So stay tuned for more changes and updates going forward. Thank you to everyone for reading.
Sometimes and idea comes along that is so simple you can’t believe you haven’t seen it before. This prototype traffic signal in Quebec is red by default, and it will only turn green if its radar detects an approaching vehicle that is traveling at or below the speed limit.
Signal creator Kalitec calls the signal EARL for “Educational Awareness Reward Light (in French it is called FRED for “feu de ralentissement éducatif”). The test signal has been installed near a school in Brossard, Canada, to enforce the 30 km/h (about 19 mph) speed limit there. It’s sort of serving the function of a speed hump, but without the hump.
The FRED light in Brossard is being tried out for a 90-day trial period on Rue Stravinski, a two-lane street that runs through a suburban residential area.
Before the light was installed, Mayor [Doreen] Assaad said that Rue Stravinski had average vehicle speeds of 40 km/h (25 mph). But in the past week, average speeds have dropped to 29 km/h (18 mph). […]
“Fines might be effective, but it’s effective after-the-fact,” says Mayor Assaad. “The beauty of FRED is we reward good behavior, and it’s immediate. It doesn’t record any private information, it just detects that the vehicle is coming and measures its speed. So it’s a carrot instead of a stick.”
