Seattle Bike Blog

Tell King County Parks trails should be open 24 hours

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

October 15, 2024

These people should be biking on busy street instead, according to parks rules.
It’s midnight, and you’re biking home from a night out. Should you ride on the separated biking and walking path or along the side of the nearby state highway? If you think the answer is obvious, then congratulations! You’re a lawbreaker.
King County Trails are only open from dawn until dusk. We can debate whether any park should close at dusk, but regional trails are important transportation infrastructure. It makes no more sense to close a trail at night than it does a road or highway. People travel at all hours, so our safest biking and walking routes need to be open at all hours.
The good news is that King County is currently considering changes to the time of day restrictions on trails, and they are collecting feedback through an online survey. Go fill it out, and tell them that trails should be open 24 hours.
The reality is that this is not a real rule, and everybody knows it. I have never heard of anyone getting in trouble solely for biking on a King County trail after dusk. But that’s also a problem. Having a rule on the books that essentially everybody ignores gives law enforcement wide discretion about who they stop. Other similar laws, such as King County’s old bicycle helmet law, have been misused to profile people based on race or homelessness status. This is a big reason why the King County Board of Health repealed the helmet law in 2022.
The King County Council in June tasked the Parks Department with conducting a “feasibility assessment” for extending trail hours and reporting back with the results by February. The current survey will surely be part of that assessment. The Council also gave the Parks Director the power to extend trail hours on a trail-by-trail basis without the need for further Council action. They also allowed Parks to keep trails open even if they pass through parks that are otherwise closed. So everything is set up for Parks to take action and change these trail rules.
It should be 100% legal to bike or walk on the safest route regardless of the time of day. Period. There is no wiggle room here.
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tags: king county parks, parks and recreation, trail open hours

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Saturday: Celebrate the opening of the 6th Ave NW neighborhood greenway with a community bike ride

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

October 14, 2024

The purple line is the new greenway route, and the yellow line is Saturday’s ride route. From SDOT.
Do you often find yourself reluctantly biking on busy 8th Ave NW and its incomplete and skinny door zone bike lanes? Well then, you have something to celebrate Saturday.
SDOT will cut the ribbon on a new neighborhood greenway on 6th Avenue NW from Leary Way to the NW 58th Street neighborhood greenway Saturday (October 19). Meet 10 a.m. at the intersection of NW 58th Street and 6th Avenue NW near West Woodland Elementary to join a family-friendly celebratory bike ride to the ribbon cutting about 10 block away at NW 48th Street.
The route is more winding than 8th Ave, but it includes new and improved crossings at both Leary Way and Market Street, offering what is hopefully an all ages and abilities connection from West Woodland Elementary and the NW 58th Avenue neighborhood greenway to the Burke-Gilman Trail. I am particularly interested to see how the Market Street crossing works in action since it has a unique design due to the intersection’s awkward offset.
Diagram of the Market Street crossing design from SDOT.
More details from SDOT:
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tags: 6th ave nw, ballard, sdot

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Alert 10/11-13: 520 Bridge Trail closed, but biking will still be the best way to get around

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

October 11, 2024

Closed section of SR-520, from WSDOT.
The 520 Bridge Trail will be closed across Lake Washington from 11 p.m. tonight (October 11) until 5 a.m. Monday (October 14). There was a bit of confusion about this earlier, but WSDOT has confirmed the closure.
Despite this, biking is still going to be the best way to get around town this weekend. I mean it always is, but especially so due to a bunch of major road closures on the Ballard Bridge and SR-520 as well as lane reductions and overnight closures for the SR-99 Tunnel, I-5 and I-405.

tags: 520 trail, Bike Route Alert, wsdot

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Move Redmond: Add protection to buffered bike lanes in the city budget + A note on evolving bike lane terminology

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

October 10, 2024

Move Redmond put out an action alert asking people contact the Redmond City Council and/or attend one of the upcoming public hearings on October 15 urging them to add enough funding to upgrade the city’s planned buffered bike lanes to protected bike lanes.
Now, I may be biased because Move Redmond’s Executive Director Kelli Refer is also my spouse and the love of my life (that’s her cheering as our cargo bike hits 10,000 miles). But it’s also a reasonable and worthwhile ask. Buffered bike lanes increase the space between the bike lane and the general purpose lane in order to better enforce a safer passing distance and make the bike experience more comfortable. But if you’re creating a buffer space anyway, why not add a barrier there and get more benefit out of the same road space? Sure, the barriers do cost more money, but the level of safety and comfort they provide are well worth it. You don’t want a Redmond community member to give biking a chance only to have to make a scary merge into traffic because someone parked in the city’s brand new bike lane.
“Redmond already has a beloved and widely-used bike trail network,” the organization wrote in their sample action alert text. “By adding physical protection to bike lanes, we can create a trail-like experience on our streets.”
The streets in question include Bel-Red Road, Avondale Road, Old Redmond Road and Red-Wood Road.
A note on evolving bike lane terminology
The terminology around bike lane types is getting a bit mixed these days. It used to be that “buffered bike lanes” only referred to painted buffers without anything in the buffer space, like much of Dexter Avenue along Queen Anne. This is how Seattle Bike Blog uses the term. But I’ve lately seen people start to refer to bike lanes with plastic flex posts as “buffered,” reserving the term “protected” for bike lanes with physical barriers that might actually impede a vehicle from entering the bike lane. I get the reasoning behind this shift in language, but it also introduces new complications. For example, there are many bike lane barrier materials that fall into the middle ground, such as those plastic posts mounted on a larger plastic curb or those zebra-striped “armadillo” things or even concrete curbs that people can drive over without too much issue.
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tags: action alerts, buffered bike lanes, kelli refer, move redmond, protected bike lanes, redmond

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The shovels are in the dirt, so Eastlake bike lanes are really happening

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

October 8, 2024

These elected and agency leaders will be building the Eastlake bike lanes by hand.
Seattle leadership across three mayors have supported building bike lanes on Eastlake Ave as part of the RapidRide J project, but you just never know what might happen before the shovels hit the dirt.
Well, the shovels are officially in the dirt now, and at the groundbreaking celebration today (October 8) Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell touted “3.7 miles of protected bike lanes” among the project’s benefits. “It embodies our administration’s commitment to transportation safety and sustainable transportation options.”
In addition to protected bike lanes on Eastlake Ave, one of the most sought-after bike network improvements in the city, the project also includes a protected bike lane up 11th Avenue NE to connect to the under-construction bike lanes as part of the 11th/12th Ave NE paving project.
Once the RapidRide J bike lanes are complete, There will be a connected all ages and abilities bike route from the downtown bike network to Roosevelt Station via Eastlake and the U District. It will also complete a new Lake Union Loop bike route, which will surely become popular. More importantly, it will cut about a mile (or 10 minutes) out of the bike journey between the city center and the University of Washington compared to routing over to the Fremont Bridge as many people do today.
But the most important project goal is to prevent injuries and deaths by addressing some persistent danger spots for people who bike on this much shorter and faster route despite its lack of a bike lane. An extensive study into bike route options in the area (PDF) found that from 2012 through 2017, there were 39 collision reports involving people biking, and 95% of those resulted in injuries to the person biking. 8% of the collisions resulted in serious injuries. Though there were no deaths during the study period, there was a fatality on this route a few years prior (RIP Bryce Lewis).
The clear need for a safer route here seemed to be a guiding principle for this project from the very start of planning back in 2015. Though the city did respond to backlash by conducting a ridiculously extensive study of the options, the data confirmed that Eastlake bike lanes were the best way to improve safety and create a usable and connected bike route. At no point did SDOT or any of the mayors signal that they were leaning against these bike lanes. They deserve credit for standing behind SDOT staff and our safe streets goals despite sometimes heated opposition (though perhaps it helped that some opponents made such fools of themselves at times). You can follow the full history of this project through the Seattle Bike Blog archives.
It took a lot of advocacy to get this point, with Cascade Bicycle Club leading calls for Eastlake bike lanes for well more than a decade and Seattle Neighborhood Greenways organizing on the ground in recent years (Editor’s Note: I updated the post to recognize SNG’s work). It also took countless cumulative hours from hundreds or maybe thousands of people like you all who attended so many public meetings and filled out so many online surveys. Some folks in Eastlake even volunteered for their Community Council in hopes of working within that structure to support these bike lanes and transit improvements. Congratulations to all of you, even those of you who feel like your efforts didn’t work. Because look, they did.

tags: bruce harrell, eastlake, rapidride j, sdot

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We just hit 10,000 miles on our 3-year-old family cargo bike

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

October 7, 2024

Our family cargo bike just rolled over to 10,000 miles. It took three years as our primary mode of kid transportation to get there.
Even as much as I talk up how great an electric cargo bike can be as a family-hauling vehicle, I may still be underselling it. 3,333 miles per year is equivalent to biking from Seattle to Florida every year. And we’re just getting around town, buying groceries, doing school drop-off, etc. Doing all this by the average US car would burn about 150 gallons of gas. Sure, in the grand scheme of global climate change, 150 gallons is barely anything. But at the same time, 150 gallons is a shit load of gasoline.
Better yet, we are having a blast. We all love this bike (a Tern GSD). Riding around this beautiful city, rain or shine, is a joyful part of each day. It is possible to be a car-free family without a cargo bike. We take transit often, and you all know I love our buses and trains. But the cargo bike makes so many tasks so much easier, and the electric assist means we choose the bike even when I’m feeling tired.
Want to shake up your life and stop spending so much time looking at the taillights in front of you or planning your life around freeway closures and major event traffic? Get yourself an electric cargo bike (or any bike). You might just find that you didn’t actually need your car as much as you thought you did, and you’ll discover a world of joy and adventure in its place.

tags: cargo bikes, tern gsd

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