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A section of the Interurban Trail near the Algona/Pacific border will be closed for repairs now until January 27.
There is no official detour or temporary trail. Frontage Road is probable the most obvious alternative, though Josh Putnam noted some additional options via Tacoma Blvd or a longer route via Milwaukee Blvd: (more…)
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Saw this making the rounds and had to share it with you all:
Boeing workers have long relied on bicycles to move around their enormous facilities, and they started switching to cargo trikes back in 2015.
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Though many of the Seattle City Council’s more ambitious budget goals were shelved following a grim revenue forecast, the nearly-complete 2023-24 budget retains the Vision Zero and Missing Link redesign funds that Mayor Bruce Harrell initially proposed and sets aside $1 million for upgrading many District 2 bike lane barriers to concrete.
Considering the budget crunch, biking and safe streets did OK through this Council budget process. Many larger project additions didn’t make it, such as Councilmember Lisa Herbold’s effort to revive the shelved Fauntleroy project, Councilmember Andrew Lewis’s effort to save the Thomas Street Redesigned project that Mayor Harrell cut, and Councilmember Tammy Morales’s Home Zone program expansion. The Council also made some frustrating cuts to the sidewalk repair program and ADA compliance in parks.
But the ill-advised bike and scooter share tax was also cut, which is a significant win considering how appealing a new potential revenue source was during an austerity budget session. However, as we argued, the revenue was far from assured, and creating the new taxing process could even have cost the city money in its first year of operation.
One of the biggest wins late in the Council’s deliberations was a Councilmember Morales proviso setting aside $1 million “solely for the replacement of plastic bollards with concrete barriers on currently protected bike lanes in Council District Two and may be spent for no other purpose” (budget action PDF). Morales tried hard to get more street safety funds into this budget, continuing to stand out as a champion for Vision Zero and equitable safety investments.
In the end, some but not all budget asks from Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and Cascade Bicycle Club made it through. You can track all the budget amendments using this very handy city website.
While not related to biking specifically, Ryan Packer at the Urbanist has sounded the alarm about a concerning move to shift $12 million in funds from Seattle’s 2020 transit funding ballot measure to fund bridge maintenance instead of transit service. They are managing this bait and switch by noting that buses also use the bridges, so it should count as a transit investment. This is not what voters thought they were voting for when an overwhelming 80% of them approved this measure. There are many pools of money available to fund bridges that are not available for transit service, such as state gas taxes. That’s why it is so important to protect transit service funds. Unfortunately, the severe bus driver shortage has been leading to King County Metro bus service cuts even as funds are available to maintain that service. So as reserves from the ballot measure built up, it became a juicy pot of cash to raid.
The City Council is scheduled to make a final vote on the budget 2 p.m. Tuesday. While they are able to make last-minute changes, approval is often more of a formality as the vast majority of debates happened in the Budget Committee.
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People held a series of actions and press conferences across the Puget Sound region to remember the victims of traffic violence and call for action to prevent more of them.
A Rainier Valley Greenways action at Seattle City Hall set out 189 pairs of shoes to represent the people killed on Seattle streets since announcing the Vision Zero program in 2015. Actually, they had to update their sign to say 190 after learning of another death over the weekend. As of posting this story, the total was up to 191.
190 people have died on Seattle streets since the City announced its commitment to ending traffic violence. These shoes represent children, spouses, grandparents, friends, & neighbors killed since then.
Join the fight for safer streets: https://t.co/ar9S1ouqpu@RVGreenways pic.twitter.com/P6Bq0AzEfY— Bob Svercl (@bobco85) November 21, 2022
Washington Bikes also held press events in Seattle and Everett with a third planned to start at 4 p.m. in Tacoma. The events included heart-wrenching statements from people who have lost loved ones as well as calls for policy changes. (more…)
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In the dead of night in early April 2013, one First Hill resident dragged $350 worth of reflective plastic posts down the hill and glued them on top of the brand new bike lane line SDOT had painted on Cherry Street under I-5. He then went home and wrote an email to Seattle Bike Blog with a cc to then-Director of SDOT Peter Hahn explaining his action. He called himself the Reasonably Polite Seattleites.
A “guerilla” bike lane was already an interesting story, but it was SDOT’s response that attracted national and global attention. Yes, the department sent out a crew to remove the posts, which did not conform to standards. But SDOT’s new Traffic Engineer Dongho Chang surprised everyone when he apologized to the Reasonably Polite Seattleites for needing to remove the posts, thanked them for their statement about the need for more bike lane protection, and then offered to return the posts. But it didn’t end there. Within months, SDOT crews were out installing plastic posts as an official city engineered project.
I know that today’s SDOT is aware of the story of the Reasonably Polite Seattleites, but judging by this week’s response to a community-created crosswalk on Capitol Hill, they may have missed the lesson it can teach them. Dongho making that Cherry Street bike lane official did not set off a string of other unofficial bike lanes across the city. His thoughtful response did not embolden people to take matters into their own hands to get their desired improvements completed. It did the exact opposite. It communicated to people that they don’t need to do this themselves because SDOT was going to do better. And they did. The number of protected bike lanes they installed increased dramatically after 2013 thanks to the department’s commitment to the revised Bicycle Master Plan.
This week, SDOT presented a gruff and authoritative stance against the painters of the Olive Way crosswalk, writing on Twitter, “Improperly painted crosswalks give a false sense of safety which puts pedestrians in danger. There are better ways for people to work w/ us to indicate crossing improvement needs & to make sure changes achieve what is intended — get people to their destinations safely.”
People have responded adversarially as you would expect because the whole point of the crosswalk action (I assume since I don’t actually know the painter’s intent) was to highlight the city’s lack of urgency in painting official ones. It comes off as though the agency is more concerned about defending its domain over street changes than it is about creating safe places for people to cross the street. (more…)
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