King County Parks will be making pavement repairs to the Burke-Gilman Trail between 47th Ave NE and 61st Ave NE in Kenmore between June 13 and 24. The good news is that users will be able to get by the work area without a big, hilly detour like we’ve seen in the past. However, you should expect delays and possibly some walking.
“Pavement repairs will be conducted on the Burke-Gilman Trail from 47th Ave NE to 61st Ave NE in Kenmore from Monday 6/13 – Friday 6/24 between the hours of 7 AM & 5 PM. The trail will be accessible via designated detours on the shoulder during construction hours, & open outside of construction hours. Bicyclists should expect to walk bikes in the construction zone, & commuters should expect intermittent closures of up to 15 minutes.”
The Leafline Trails Coalition got a special guest for their online event announcing their new 900-mile regional trails vision: Governor Jay Inslee, who called in from a bike on the Sound to Olympics Trail in Kitsap County.
The Governor called in to voice support for the trails vision, which spans King, Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish Counties. It happens around the 7:00 mark in the video recording of the event. He called it “the most exciting mapping project since Peter Puget mapped the shores of Puget Sound in 1792.”
Of the 900-mile network, 500 miles are already open. So the region is already halfway there.
The Leafline Trails Coalition started in 2019 as a way to encourage and coordinate a trail network that crosses city and county lines. It includes public partners from cities and counties as well as private partners like REI and community organizations. Below is the print version of the map. You can also explore a digital version. You can also see the criteria for inclusion in the map (PDF).
Shout out to the person I just saw biking in shorts and short sleeves with Bar Mitts still on your handlebars. You’ve been fooled before, and you will not be fooled again. I respect that.
A water pipe burst inside the wall of my kid’s bedroom a week ago, so it has been a stressful and expensive week of sleeping at a friend’s house, cleaning stuff and waiting for stuff to dry. So much waiting.
However, the whole fiasco did give me the push I needed to finally build the loft bed I had been promising the kid for at least a year. After drawing out the plans with my friend Danny (who knows a lot more about carpentry than I do), we headed to Dunn Lumber to acquire the materials: One sheet of dry wall, two sheets of 3/4″ plywood and five 2x4s. When the salesperson asked what vehicle I drove so the lumber yard person could find me, I said, “A bicycle trailer.”
I love hauling stuff by bike. Not only is it fun, it’s also often easier than using many motor vehicles. A lot of cars can’t fit a full 8×4 sheet inside, so your only option is to try to strap it to the top. And driving with stuff on top of a car isn’t fun, it’s stressful. A pickup truck or large van can fit lumber just fine, but where’s the adventure in that?
I pulled the trailer with the e-assist cargo bike, which did make the hill-climbing quite a bit easier.
The trail under the 520 Bridge east of Montlake Boulevard will close permanently June 6 as crews begin work on a new biking and walking bridge over the freeway, according to WSDOT.
The trail opened in March 2020 and was labeled as a temporary route, but it was very welcome at the time. After crews closed the 24th Ave E bridge, which had formerly been the primary bike route, the biking and walking detour to Montlake Blvd was not great. The old skinny sidewalk was sorely inadequate for a two-way biking and walking route, and the state chose not to make extra space on the boulevard to make the detour better.
Unfortunately, people will once again need to detour to Montlake Blvd for an extended period of time. This time, however, they will detour to an under-construction Montlake Blvd. as crews work to significantly expand the roadway as part of the $4.51 billion freeway expansion project (the total climbs to $5.11 billion when you add in the “Rest of the West” connection to Roanoke and I-5). Hopefully the biking and walking detour will not be as stressful as before, though that remains to be seen.
People will be need to deal with a detour until the new biking and walking bridge or the new path along 24th Ave E are open, currently scheduled for full completion in 2023. Hopefully a usable alternative will open as soon as possible.
Biking to preschool this morning, as my daughter and I biked across the University Bridge like we do every morning, we saw some Seattle Police boats fishing in the calm waters of Lake Union below us. But they weren’t searching for fish, they were searching for a human being, the victim of a horrific act of violence hundreds of feet above the water.
The exact details are not all clear yet, but several people reported via Twitter that they saw a stalled vehicle on the bridge on the I-5 Ship Canal Bridge before two cars collided. The impact was so powerful that the vehicles rolled over. One person was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. But the occupant of the other car was missing. The Harbor Patrol found their body hours later. The impact had apparently thrown them over the side of the towering freeway bridge and down hundreds of feet to the lake below.
Our deepest condolences go to this person’s friends and family.
I didn’t tell my daughter what the boats were doing in the water this morning, but I knew because I had seen the news reports before we left the home. My feed was full of news about the traffic backup. I-5 was closed southbound, and the traffic backup was going to be big. Here this person experienced unimaginable violence, and the news was mostly about a traffic jam. How can our society be so callous about human tragedy?
This morning’s fatality was exceptionally dramatic, but it is otherwise horribly common. 538 people died in Washington State traffic collisions in 2019. Of those, 327 were drivers or passengers in cars. Why do people who drive accept the level of danger they face every day traveling our highways and city streets? Where is the grassroots organization of car drivers demanding safer roadways? These deaths are preventable. This doesn’t happen everywhere, and there are known solutions that make roadways safer. Why is there no organization of drivers demanding that our public agencies implement solutions that could save lives? (more…)
King County Parks will be making pavement repairs to the Burke-Gilman Trail between 47th Ave NE and 61st Ave NE in Kenmore between June 13 and 24. The good news is that users will be able to get by the work area without a big, hilly detour like we’ve seen in the past. However, you should expect delays and possibly some walking.
