Seattle Bike Blog

No, the city is NOT cutting down cherry trees to build a bike project

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

March 7, 2023

Contrary to what you may have read on Twitter or saw written on yellow signs on trees on Pike Street near the market, Seattle’s decision to cut down cherry trees on the block between 1st and 2nd Avenues has nothing to do with bike improvements.

In fact, the project removing the trees will also remove the existing two-way bike lane on this block, a significant downgrade for biking. The change is part of the larger “Pike Pine Streetscape and Bicycle Improvements Project,” which does include exciting bike lane improvements between 2nd Ave and Bellevue Ave. However, the project’s design for the block with the doomed cherry trees will dramatically expand the amount of space for cars at the expense of all other users. Below are some concept images from the project’s outreach materials:

Looking at this, and you can see why it was so frustrating to read a Tweet from the Seattle Times that said, “To make way for a bike and pedestrian corridor, eight cherry trees will be cut down.” The exact opposite is true. This block’s design deletes the entire two-way bike lane and slightly reduces the sidewalk width in order to add car parking and widen the driving lane. Just because the concept image creators desaturated the colors in the “existing” photo doesn’t mean the “proposed” image is better. Here’s let’s try it another way:

For what it’s worth, Seattle Bike Blog would happily see the city cancel this one block of the project and more forward with the rest. This “curbless” street concept has yet to actually prove to be an improvement for walking or biking in Seattle, though they keep trying it (Denny Way near Capitol Hill Station and Bell Street are two such examples). In our deeply-ingrained car culture, cars will occupy every inch they can. The wider the driving lane, the faster people will drive, and if there is space that is not physically blocked, people will park their car there or use it to pass someone else. A curbless street is only better for people walking and biking if there are significant obstacles for cars or if cars are not allowed at all. The proposed design is worse in every way.

So keep the cherry trees until they actually need to be replaced. As David Kroman’s story in the Times notes (unlike the Tweet, the story gets the details right), cherry trees don’t love being in urban tree pits and might not last much longer. Maybe by then we’ll have a design for this block that truly does make it better for walking and biking.

tags: curbless streets, downtown, pike, pike pine renaissance, pike place market

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King County study finds helmet use unchanged after law repeal

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

March 6, 2023

One year ago, the King County Board of Health voted 11–2 to repeal the county’s rare all-ages bicycle helmet law. One of the arguments in favor of repeal was that the law was not a top reason that most people choose to wear a helmet. To test this assertion, Public Health – Seattle & King County conducted an observational study (PDF) to assess helmet use after the repeal went into effect. And sure enough, helmet use remains high across King County, especially for people riding their own bicycles.

Researchers counted about 2,000 people at more than 50 different locations around the county. 91% of riders on personal bicycles wore a helmet while 45% of bike share users wore one. Only 9% of scooter share riders wore a helmet. Together, bike and scooter helmet use sat at 85%, with is higher than the 80% a similar study found in 2004. As David Kroman noted in the Seattle Times, the results are also nearly identical to a 2018 study led by a group of Harborview and UW researchers. This suggests that people are choosing to wear a helmet for reasons separate from the threat of police action, such as feeling safer with head protection.

It is probably worth revisiting this study in a few years to see if things change with time, but this initial result is a good sign that the Board’s reasoning was indeed sound. It should also be instructive for other places considering a helmet law repeal. The King County Board of Health was clear during deliberations that they supported the use of helmets, but they had concerns about inequitable enforcement. Black people in Seattle were 3.8 times more likely to get a helmet citation than a white person, an analysis by the volunteer-led Helmet Law Working Group found. “Differences in helmet use between populations cannot explain these disparities,” the group noted in their report. These figures do not account for stops that did not result in a citation.

On somewhat of a side note, the bike share figure is surprisingly high considering riders would have needed to plan ahead and bring a helmet with them. The sample size was 68, which seems significant enough to take seriously. As someone who owns a bike, my bike share use is mostly limited to spontaneous trips when I’m already out and about and unlikely to have a helmet with me. But I guess there are a lot of users who leave home knowing they are going to be using bike share to get around. It also suggests diverging use cases for shared bikes compared to shared scooters. Are scooters more likely to be used spontaneously while the bikes are more likely to be part of a user’s plan? We already know that bike share trips tend to be longer in distance than scooter trips, so perhaps this is another clue. It also suggests that there is value in bike share separate from scooter share, and that the two device types should not be considered interchangeable by government policy writers or by the companies offering them.

tags: bike share, helmet laws, helmets, king county board of health

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Greenways and Cascade seek more specifics in plan to get Vision Zero back on track

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

March 2, 2023

The top 20 priority pedestrian safety locations. What’s the plan to fix them all as soon as possible?

SDOT is set to present their “top to bottom review” of the Vision Zero program to the City Council Transportation Committee March 7, and safe streets advocates are pushing for more specifics and hard deadlines to “light a fire under our elected leaders to get Vision Zero back on track,” as Cascade Bicycle Club put it.

In our previous story about the first draft of the Vision Zero review, we noted that a lot of the recommendations were internal-facing things like reorganizing internal processes and the department hierarchy. This is not necessarily a criticism of the review since this was its stated goal, but it’s also hard for the public to understand the impact of these internal changes.

The review includes lots of important findings and great statements about what needs to happen, such as the recommendation that the department must “Be willing to reduce vehicle travel speeds and convenience to improve safety.” But the review was somewhat lacking in specifics and timelines for making those necessary changes. Cascade and Greenways noticed this, too.

“[T]he public needs to know that tangible actions are coming next,” Cascade wrote in their sample letter that people can send to Councilmembers. Use their handy online tool to send your own letter. “Otherwise, it’s just another plan that gets put on a shelf.” Specifically, they are calling for Council to place a timeline on SDOT to accomplish tasks from the review, including a revision of the Vision Zero Action Plan, expanding turn on red restrictions, programming leading pedestrian intervals (giving walk signals a head start), and requiring follow-up progress reporting on these changes.

Seattle Neighborhood Greenways already offered their Vision Zero ideas back in November, which includes a lot more specific interventions the city could take. Much of their suggestions might be more appropriate for the Vision Zero Action Plan, which is why accelerating delivery of that update is important. This departmental review document is not going to get Vision Zero back on track, but it could help SDOT more effectively deliver safety-focused actions that the Mayor and Council task them with. (more…)

tags: bruce harrell, cascade bicycle club, greg spotts, seattle neighborhood greenways, vision zero

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WA Bikes: Turn on red bill is dead, license reexamination bill moving forward + more legislature updates

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

March 1, 2023
From WA Bikes.

Washington State bills banning turns on red near many key locations statewide are officially dead after neither the Senate nor the House failed to move them forward before a session deadline. This is how many bills die every year, essentially running out of momentum rather than getting voted down. It’s common for an idea to take a few years of organizing and modifying before it finally makes it through, so this hopefully isn’t the end for turn on red restrictions in future years.

But there are still good things moving through the legislature. From the latest Washington Bikes newsletter:
Last week marked the House of Origin cutoff for bills to make it out of committee. Several bike safety priorities moved forward, but #WrongOnRed, the bill to make our streets safer by banning right turns on red at busy intersections, didn’t move past fiscal cutoff.

Thanks to the hundreds of you who advocated for #WrongOnRed. Despite this setback, we’re confident that we educated leaders and the public on the safety impacts of eliminating right turns on red at intersections, and think we’re closer to local-led action because of this push.

After an initial period of intense committee hearings, we’ll see a flurry of floor action over the next few weeks, where bill are voted on by the full House or Senate. After that, bills will head to the opposite chamber for committee consideration – and we’ll need your help demonstrating support for active transportation and safety.

Highlights for week 8 (Feb 27 – March 3):
- Yesterday, Monday, Feb. 27, WA Bikes priority bill, HB 1319 – legislation uniting the vehicular assault and Cooper Jones act, triggering driver’s license re-examination after a crash – sailed through its third and final reading on the House floor, with unanimous support, 96 votes for and 0 against!
- Check the updated status of our priority bills in the 2023 WA Bill Tracker.
tags: 2023 legislature, washington bikes, WrongOnRed

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Saturday: R+E Cycles celebrates 50 years in the U District

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

February 28, 2023

1970s photo from R+E Cycles.

R+E Cycles is turning 50 years old, and the storied bike shop and frame builders behind the Rodriguez and Erickson custom bikes will be celebrating by hosting the return of the free Bike and Pike expo for the first time since 2019.

Bike and Pike runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday (March 4) at R+E Cycles on the Ave between NE 56th Street and Ravenna Blvd. “Come join us for coffee, beer, bicycles, and a chance to converse one-on-one with some of The Northwest’s cycling gurus,” R+E wrote in the event description.

There will be a special guest this year. Ángel Rodriguez is heading to back to Seattle from his home on the side of a volcano in Panama. In addition to building bikes, Rodriguez was a major Seattle bicycling booster throughout the city’s biking boom years of the 70s and 80s (I interviewed him for my upcoming book Biking Uphill in the Rain). So welcome back to Seattle, Ángel!

More details on Bike and Pike from R+E:

We’re Turning 50!
And we want celebrate dang it! We want you to join us, along with R+E Cycles founder, Angel Rodriguez in person for the long awaited return of R+E Cycles Bike and Pike expo. It’s been a long 3 years, so let’s kick the 2023 cycling season off right!

Come join us for coffee, beer, bicycles, and a chance to converse one-on-one with some of The Northwest’s cycling gurus at The Seattle Bike and Pike Expo of 2023.

At R+E Cycles, we love Seattle, and the small companies that actually produce their products here. In October 2008, I asked our friends at Pike Brewing Company in Downtown Seattle if they would like to put on an event here in Seattle with other Seattle based entrepreneurs (and personalities) and they were just as excited about it as we were.

The flavor of Seattle Small Business is unique
But that flavor really gets diluted when an event gets overwhelmed with big firms that have unlimited advertising budgets. We thought it would be great to put on a smaller event that showcased unique Seattle companies and their products, while at the same time raise money for a local charity. This is why we started the event.

Over the last fourteen years, the Bike and Pike has been a great success! We’ve raised over $56,000 for Food Lifeline here in Seattle, and had lots of fun doing it. You’ve helped us raise enough for almost 195,000 meals! Thank You!

Want to go to an event this March that’s bicycle oriented and highly focused on Seattle based small businesses? The 2023 Seattle Bike and Pike Expo is for you!

tags: angel rodriguez, bike and pike, erickson bicycles, events, R+E Cycles, rodriguez bicycles

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Draft of SDOT’s Vision Zero review suggests internal reorganizing and more funding, but it feels small compared to our traffic violence emergency

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

February 27, 2023

On his first day on the job, SDOT Director Greg Spotts pledged a “top-to-bottom review” of the department’s Vision Zero program to figure out why traffic injuries and deaths are increasing, especially for people walking and rolling. He assigned employees from outside the Vision Zero team to perform the review, and they released a draft of their findings Thursday.

The document is mostly designed to be inside-facing, meaning it is intended to guide the department on how it can better deliver safer streets. But it also notes a few areas where the department needs outside help, mostly in the form of clear leadership and better funding for safety initiatives.

Most of the findings are probably not news to regular readers of Seattle Bike Blog, but it’s good to see them confirmed. For example, they found that when the city makes safety changes to streets, streets get safer.

“We found that safety interventions and countermeasures used by SDOT to advance Vision Zero make our streets safer,” the report notes. In fact, the report does not in any way place the blame for Seattle’s lack of safety progress on the existing Vision Zero program team. Every time it analyzes the team’s work, it finds that they are effective. The team has produced valuable data highlighting problem areas that need safety fixes citywide, and the relatively few projects they have led have made those streets safer. The problem is that they are just a small team with a very modest budget. A few miles per year will not get us to Vision Zero any time soon, especially at a time when deaths are on the rise nationwide. One way to put it is that the national and statewide trend of increasing traffic deaths is overpowering Seattle’s Vision Zero efforts in recent years. But that’s not an excuse, it’s a call to action.

Vision Zero is supposed to be a department-wide goal, and that’s where the work often falls short. The report offers a list of strategies for doing better. “We also identified dozens of potential opportunities to improve SDOT’s Vision Zero efforts – by strengthening policies and improving policy implementation, streamlining decision-making, improving project delivery, and moving more quickly toward broader implementation of proven interventions where they are most needed.”

(more…)

tags: bruce harrell, greg spotts, sdot, vision zero

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