Seattle Parks announced a scaled-back schedule for Bicycle Weekends on Lake Washington Boulevard (known since 1968 as Bicycle Sunday). The route and number of weekends are the same, but the timeframes have been cut back significantly. The department also removed the July 4 holiday from the schedule.
The lineup is still larger than years before 2020, when the event only lasted for a few hours on select Sundays in the spring and summer. But the 2023 schedule seems to ignore well-reasoned suggestions from Rainier Valley Greenways to make the schedule more predictable by holding the events every weekend and holiday, instead opting to reduce the car-free time compared to 2022 by waiting until 10 a.m. Saturday to put up the road closure barriers rather than putting them in place Friday evening. The department will also remove the barriers at 6 p.m. on Sundays rather than taking them down Monday morning.
It will still be a wonderful time, like it has been for a half century. My kid recently learned how to ride her bike, and she is extremely excited about being able to bike in a big street. Lake Washington Boulevard is such a beautiful place. It’s a shame it is reserved for stressful car traffic the vast majority of the year.
The Washington State legislature has officially passed the 2023-25 budget, which includes significant increases in traffic safety funding as well as new e-bike incentives.
Washington Bikes celebrated the budget news, calling the investments in biking and walking “unprecedented.” The appropriations (PDF) for the three-year period include $175.5 million for “active transportation” projects and programs, including safety grants, complete streets, Safe Routes to School and school-based bicycle education.
The state also includes $5 million for an e-bike rebate program, allowing anyone to apply for a $300 rebate when purchasing an e-bike in the state. Residents in households with incomes at or below 80% of the county’s median income can qualify for a much larger $1,200 rebate. The and $2 million to help employers, governments, tribes or nonprofits establish e-bike “lending libraries” to help lower the barrier to entry for e-bikes, which are typically more expensive than pedal-only bikes.
The budget also includes funding for a statewide sidewalk analysis project that the Disability Mobility Initiative and Front and Centered promoted. The state does not currently have comprehensive record of where sidewalks do and do not exist, and there is definitely no comprehensive data on which sidewalks have accessible curbs. This is boring work that is extremely important. We can’t effectively fix the problem if we don’t know where the problem is. This is the first step to a complete statewide sidewalk network.
The budget passed with unanimous bipartisan support (98-0 in the House and 46-3 in the Senate). State Democrats, who control both chambers, highlighted these safety investments:
increasing safe routes to school
mapping sidewalk gaps
improving busy intersections
introducing grade separation on rural roads to prevent serious crashes from lane departures
directing the Traffic Safety Commission to study and respond to alarming safety trends
addressing the section of Pacific Avenue at 134th St. in Parkland that led to the death of 13-year-old Michael Weilert, who was struck and killed while riding his bike at a crosswalk at that intersection in July 2022
A single mother of four was killed, the person responsible fled, and nobody even bothered to tell her children.
This happened in our city, Seattle, and everyone needs to stop what they’re doing and acknowledge it. The story of what happened to Mamy Mbiya Lutumba and her four children is inexcusable on many levels. Our city failed over and over again, stacking heartbreak on top of heartbreak. This cannot be our city. Seattle is better than this.
Lutumba and her family moved to Seattle less than a year ago, according to a must-read story by Daisy Zavala Magaña at the Seattle Times and a news report on King 5. Lutumba’s husband was killed in Congo in 2010, and she and her kids sought asylum in Namibia before resettling in the U.S. eight years ago. Her cousin told the Times that she moved her family to Seattle to give her kids more opportunities. “Everything she did was for her children,” he told the Times. A GoFundMe has been set up to support her family.
Lutumba was walking home from her job at a SoDo recycling company March 16 when someone driving a white Dodge Charger struck and killed her at the intersection of 4th Ave S and S Lander Street, the Times reported. The killer fled the scene and has not yet been found.
Police closed the street to investigate and even posted about it on the SPD Blotter. But nobody told her children, who were at home wondering why their mother had not returned from work. Magaña at the Times spoke with her children—aged 14, 16, 18 and 20—and they described their efforts to figure out what happened. They reported her missing to police both on the phone and in person. They even made fliers and went down to the area around her work to hang them up. It wasn’t until Lutumba’s manager told them there was a traffic death the night she went missing that they started calling hospitals and learned the horrible truth.
“This whole time she was dead,” Giselle Manda, the oldest of the siblings, told the Times. “I don’t understand why police would not notify us. I feel that no one is taking this seriously.”
OK, this is amazing. As a GeoGuessr fan, this game is right up my alley. Or perhaps I should say that this game is parked right in my bike lane.
Sanders Lauture created a program last year that allows people to submit photo reports of cars parked in Seattle bike lanes via social media or directly through the Cars In Bike Lanes website. Aside from maintaining a collection of photos of this unfortunately common occurrence, the website also has a great trick up its sleeve: A game.
If you’ve ever played GeoGuessr, then you probably already understand how it works. Seattle Bike Lane Guesser shows you a random photo from the database, and you have to click on a map to show where you think the photo was taken. The closer you are to the actual location, the more points you get. So it turns into a test of your knowledge of Seattle bike lanes. But perhaps more satisfying, it makes something fun out of something that’s very frustrating.
You can see it in action in Hanoch’s video on Best Side Cycling posted above. If you give it a try, play 10 games and post your score in the comments below.
Seattle’s recent Vision Zero review noted that 80% of people killed while walking on Seattle streets are killed on streets with multiple lanes in the same direction. So why are we on the verge of opening a brand new streets through Belltown near Pike Place Market with multiple lanes in the same direction?
I ride Western Ave every day while taking my kid to and from preschool, so I’ve watched the under-construction roadway come together. This new street will connect Alaskan Way on the waterfront to Western and Elliott Avenues through Belltown. The roadway is supposed to restore a connection that was removed along with the Viaduct, but the city has been operating just fine without this connection for years.
Now that it is on the verge of opening, I have a plea for WSDOT and SDOT: Only open one lane and see how it goes. Keep the other one coned off. Because we know from far too many tragic data points that having too many lanes increases speeding, reducing yielding and results in injuries and deaths. It would be actively harmful to open multiple lanes through this neighborhood.
The decisions about the design of this roadway happened many years ago as part of the mega-project to remove the Alaskan Way Viaduct. But it’s 2023 now, and our city is in the midst of a traffic safety crisis. We know we need to take bold action to improve the safety of streets across our city, and redesigning streets with multiple lanes in the same direction is the most important thing we can do. Here, the state and the city have an opportunity to demonstrate their commitments to traffic safety by rethinking an old decision about these Belltown connections and prioritize safety above maximizing motor vehicle capacity at all costs.
Multi-lane streets are a highway design that don’t belong in neighborhoods. We have unfortunately had to learn this lesson the hardest way possible. But it’s never too late to make a better and safer choice.
The great thing about street safety projects is that the safety impacts can snowball. For example, if the state and city keep this new roadway at one lane and everything works just fine, then the city could extend that safer design all the way down Western through Belltown. We could have safe crosswalks, protected bike lanes and even car parking instead of turning this street into a highway.
Missing bike connection
It is also frustrating that there is no direct bike connection northbound between Bell Street and the section of Western that passes through Pike Place Market. Bell Street is a major bike route, but people headed from there to the market will be left with two lacking options: Ride on the sidewalk (or the wrong way in the bike lane) on Western or bike down a hill to Elliott just to bike back up the hill to Western.
For as much money as was spent on planning for this project, this seems like a big mistake. Was there no consideration that someone would want to bike from Bell Street to Pike Place Market, one of the biggest destinations in the whole state? Perhaps fixing this mistake could be a good use of that unnecessary lane space.
As you may have noticed from the advertisement on Seattle Bike Blog, Cascade Bicycle Club’s 2023 Ride for Major Taylor is Sunday. And the ride has two completely different route options that both start at the White Center Bicycle Playground: A shorter 26-mile loop around West Seattle, South Park, Burien and White Center, and a longer (and much hillier) 65-mile loop around the East Passage of Puget Sound via Vashon Island, Tacoma, Federal Way and Des Moines. The longer route includes two ferry rides.
So if you have never biked to Tacoma, this is a great opportunity to experience both options in a supported group ride. And hey, you can support a great program while you do it.
The club’s 2023 Bike Everywhere Breakfast is also coming up May 4 at the Sheraton Grand hotel downtown, and they have secured a great headliner: Dongho Chang. Seattle Traffic Engineer from 2012 to 2021, Chang did a lot of work to shift the city’s transportation culture to take safety much more seriously.
Bike Month Breakfasts in past years have served as launching points for major city initiatives, including the 2nd Avenue bike lane. It is both a major fundraiser for Cascade as well as a showcase of downtown business support for bicycling.
It feels like Cascade is back to operating at full strength after a couple tough years without many of the major events that define the large organization. And it’s coming at a vital time for Seattle, which is developing a new major transportation plan and will need to pass a major transportation funding measure in 2024. This also feels like the first full Bike Month in many years. What started as Bike Week a half century ago has evolved over the decades into a packed schedule of biking events and encouragement efforts spanning the month of May and culminating with Bike Everywhere Day May 19. With many people returning to offices, it should be the biggest such day in years. The schedule still isn’t quite at the level it was before the pandemic, but it’s getting there.
The 2023 Kaiser Permanente Bike Everywhere Breakfast is just around the corner! Join us bright and early on May 4 at the Sheraton Grand Seattle for our annual celebration of all things bicycling. It’s going to be a great time and you won’t want to miss it!
We will have an amazing program with keynote speaker Dongho Chang, a presentation of the Doug Walker Award, and a great conversation about how we can work to build a bikeable future. Spaces are filling up fast, so be sure to register now and save your spot.
