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The 520 Trail across the Lake Washington will be closed from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday, August 24, from Montlake to Evergreen Point.
While the roadway is closed all weekend, crews will keep the trail open during the night and on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the new walking and biking path over SR-520 in Montlake is getting a lot closer to completion. Ryan Packer toured the area, which has a nearly complete trail and landscaping. However, the opening date is still TBD, they reported.
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The South Lake Union Streetcar broke down Friday, August 9, and nobody even noticed until King County Metro and SDOT sent out a press release about it the next Monday. Like, I searched through social media posts and could not find a single person mentioning issues riding the streetcar line the entire weekend that it was out of operation. Perhaps even more damning for the line is that Metro and SDOT are not even running any kind of replacement service while the streetcar is out of commission, noting that riders are served by existing service on Routes 40, 70 and RapidRide C.
The thing that baffles me about this line is that people keep acting like the city needs to decide what to do with it when Seattle already made this decision nine years ago. The RapidRide J project was initially proposed as an extension of the streetcar from its odd terminus in the middle of Fairview Ave N north to Roosevelt Station, but Seattle decided in 2015 to make the project a bus line instead. The ongoing Route 40 Transit-Plus project was also once vaguely envisioned as a streetcar line (complete with a new Ship Canal crossing), but is now a set of bus reliability improvements. The time to fight for the streetcar happened a decade ago, and the streetcar lost.
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Electric cargo bikes are incredible machines that can do a lot of what a car can do (and a lot a car can’t do) for a fraction of the cost. They are also a lot of fun.
But even though $2,500 to $8,000 is not very much money compared to buying a car, it is still a lot of cash up-front for a bicycle. For a car-free family like mine, the cost was a no-brainer. We use it every day and are getting close to putting 10,000 miles on the Tern GSD we bought in October 2021. But folks often get sticker shock when they see how much some of these higher-end electric cargo bikes can cost. The problem is exacerbated by the relative lack of financing options available compared to the (often predatory) auto loan industry.
But what if you could lease an electric cargo bike instead? That’s the concept behind Wombi, which just launched in Seattle. For a monthly subscription fee, people can rent an electric cargo bike rather than buy one. Better yet, service as well as theft/damage insurance is included in the price. And let me tell you, service costs can really add up on these things.
Wombi launched in Los Angeles last summer, and Seattle is now the company’s second market. Wombi is the U.S. sister company to Lug+Carrie, which started in Australia in 2019 and operates in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. They currently offer three models of electric-assist Tern bikes: The Quick Haul budget mid-tail (retail starts: ~$2,500, Wombi starts: $115/mo), the HSD mid-tail (retail starts: ~$4,300, Wombi starts: $135/mo), and the GSD longtail (retail starts: ~$4,500, Wombi starts: $150/mo). You can also get the bikes outfitted with kid-hauling, pet-hauling and cargo-hauling accessories for additional fees. Users will have the option to buy the bike after 18 months as a subscriber, according to the Wombi website.
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The efforts by advocates at Central Seattle Greenways as well as readers like you have paid off. WSDOT announced that they are no longer planning to cut the Harvard Connection path to the planned Roanoke Lid as part of the SR-520 Portage Bay Bridge and Roanoke Lid Project.
“Following conversations with legislators, our contractor, project partners and community advocates, we have decided to maintain the Harvard Connection,” wrote WSDOT Program Administrator Omar Jepperson. “It is clear the community feels strongly about keeping this bicycle and pedestrian connection. We look forward to delivering these multimodal improvements to the city and region.”
We wrote about the community effort to save the trail connection Wednesday while also arguing that the path would recreate one of Seattle’s very first bicycle paths from the 1890s. There’s some really interesting potential for public art or historical markers of some kind to connect people with the history of white colonial settlement and development of this place, which began with a bike path that grew into a freeway.
There are still budget gaps to figure out before this final segment of the 520 freeway megaproject project begins its long construction phase. But the cutting the trail connection would barely scratch the surface of the project budget, which includes a full replacement of the entire Portage Bay Bridge between Montlake and I-5. Community advocates previously fought to keep a biking and walking trail on the new bridge, which will shorten several major regional bike routes between the city center and UW, the Burke-Gilman Trail, and Eastside communities along the 520 Trail.
Below is the full text of the letter from WSDOT:
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It is a great idea to redesign Leary Way NW and NW Market Street so they are safer for everyone while also connecting the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard, but SDOT’s current design needs significant work in order to achieve those goals.
SDOT has not released any new details about Councilmember Dan Strauss’ Market/Leary plan since we last reported on it, but they now have a simple online form for collecting public feedback. So go fill it out!
Question 1 regarding the Market Street segment is the most important. SDOT’s most recent 30% design includes several significant “mixing zones” where the trail and the sidewalk would merge together. SDOT’s own design guidelines for intersections say, “A mixing zone is not appropriate for two-way protected bike lanes.” The current design would create situations where people trying to bike in both directions along the route would mix with shoppers, people heading to the bus, people waiting for the walk signal to cross the street, and anyone else hanging out this this busy business district. This would be frustrating for people on bikes and it would be uncomfortable for people on the sidewalk. People should be able to hang out on the sidewalk without worrying about bikes coming through, and people biking should be able to rely on being able to travel along this route without needing to crawl through a crowd of people. It is in everybody’s best interest for walking and biking spaces to be separated in a busy business district, and the design team should be following best practices for two-way bike lanes through a business district. The Market segment also needs more traffic calming and safer crosswalks, goals that combine well with the goal of separating biking and walking spaces. SDOT’s Vision Zero research found that 80% of pedestrian deaths in Seattle occur on streets with multiple lanes in the same direction, so reducing the number of lanes on Market in this highly-walked business district is a worthy project entirely on its own merits while also creating the space needed to keep biking and walking separate.
If this project is designed well, the bike and scooter volumes could be very high, so it needs to be designed accordingly. Imagine a nice day with a constant stream of people biking and scootering out to Golden Gardens while another stream of people walk and bike through here to a bustling Sunday Farmer’s Market. That should be the design team’s use case.
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Not only would the Harvard Ave path connect the Roanoke Lid and 520 Trail along a safer and less steep route, it would also restore a small piece of Seattle’s first ever bike paths.
You can support a Central Seattle Greenways effort to protect the proposed path from budget cuts on the freeway megaproject.
The 1895 Lake Union Bike Path cannot be accurately restored because, well, it’s now the path of I-5 between downtown and SR-520. But photos from the turn of the 20th century show the crossroads where the Lake Union path connected to the 1896 Lake Washington Bike Path that lead folks east through the forest now known as Interlaken Park. That old crossroads would most likely be located somewhere within the I-5/520 interchange on land that was excavated for freeway construction, and the Lake Washington path hugged the hillside as it curved to the east. The closest existing land to this historic path would be the proposed Harvard Connection path that has been planned as part of the Roanoke Lid of the SR-520 replacement project.
Like the old path, the Harvard Connection would hug the hillside to follow the least-steep route as it turns east toward the lid and Interlaken Blvd. The only surviving engineering plot of the old Lake Washington path (that I was able to find, anyway) ends on top of the proposed Roanoke Lid on the northeast corner of what is now 10th Ave E and E Roanoke Street, and the early design for the lid already includes a path that follows a similar path. The proposed Harvard Connection would meet up nicely with the historic route, creating opportunities for heritage markers or public art connecting the past to the present. With the freeway interchange roaring in the background, it could be an opportunity for folks to reflect on the marks we leave on this land, how an innocent-looking bike path through the forest was a harbinger of white colonial land theft and settlement that in just a few short decades grew into a freeway.
Here’s the text of the action alert you can sign from Central Seattle Greenways:
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