The Move All Seattle Sustainably Coalition — which includes many organizations including Disability Rights Washington, Cascade Bicycle Club, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and the Transit Riders Union — hosted a mayoral forum Wednesday evening focused on walking, biking and transit issues. You can watch the whole thing above or on the Cascade Bicycle Club Facebook page.
Unfortunately, every candidate did not attend. Perhaps most notably, Colleen Echohawk was not there. But you can hear from Lorena Gonzáles, Jessyn Farrell, Andrew Grant Houston, Bruce Harrell and Lance Randall. The excellent Erica C. Barnett moderated.
UPDATE: The coalition’s City Council Position 9 forum is June 22. You can register via Zoom here.
The list of organizations backing a proposal to repeal King County’s all-ages bicycle helmet law includes many local bicycling and safe streets groups like Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and Cascade Bicycle Club as well as national organizations like People for Bikes and the League of American Bicyclists. This momentum comes as the King County Board of Health is set Thursday to begin deliberating a change to their rare regulation making it a ticketable offense for anyone to ride a bicycle without a helmet.
Real Change, Cascade and Greenways worked together over the past year to convene the Helmet Law Working Group made up of 18 people all researching best practices, the effectiveness of the law and its unintended consequences. Together, they put together a nuanced and meticulously-researched 40-page report.
The group does not recommend against wearing a helmet or deny the effectiveness of wearing a helmet when a collision occurs. Instead, it focuses entirely on the law, especially data showing that police are far more likely to stop Black people and people experiencing homelessness for bicycle helmet violations.
“In Seattle, nearly half of all helmet citations since 2017 were issued to people experiencing homelessness,” the group wrote. “Since 2003, Black cyclists in Seattle have received citations at a rate 3.8 times higher, Indigenous cyclists 2.2 times higher, and Hispanic/Latino cyclists 1.4 times higher than white cyclists. Differences in helmet use between populations cannot explain these disparities.”
This disparity in enforcement is reason enough to repeal this law.
Helmet use is too easy for officers to use as pretense for a stop. If they want to harass someone due to their race or homelessness status, the lack of helmet gives them an easy and legal excuse to do so. Well-to-do white people can already bike helmet-free around Seattle without fear of getting stopped by police. The data above does not even represent all the times officers used the helmet law as a reason to stop someone but did not end up issuing a ticket. But every police stop is an opportunity for a person to end up trapped in the so-called justice system or become the victim of police violence. Biking without a helmet simply is not an offense worthy of a police stop. (more…)
The City Council has proposed $2.5 million to make many of the city’s Stay Healthy Streets permanent and another $300,000 to fund the popular Café Streets program through 2022 as part of the $128 million Seattle Rescue Plan to “kick start the city’s recovery,” according to a City Council presentation (PDF).
Seattle Neighborhood Greenways celebrated the news and put together a handy online form you can use to voice your support for the funding. The form letter also supports an amendment from Councilmember Lisa Herbold “to use future funding to make Keep Moving Streets permanent on Alki Point, Green Lake, and Lake Washington Boulevard.”
Great news! Seattle City Council just proposed $2.5 million to make Stay Healthy Streets permanent, as well as $300,000 to fund Cafe Streets through 2022! Act now to:
Thank Seattle City Councilmembers for funding Stay Healthy Streets and Cafe Streets to help ensure that the funding isn’t removed.
Ask them to support Councilmember Herbold’s amendment to use future funding to make Keep Moving Streets permanent on Alki Point, Green Lake, and Lake Washington Boulevard.
Where the greenway ends. 28th Ave S just north of S Massachusetts Street.
For years, WSDOT has resisted working with Seattle to connect the Rainier Valley Neighborhood Greenway to the Mountains to Sound Trail (AKA the I-90 Trail), according to reporting by Ryan Packer for the Urbanist. Packer requested emails between the two public agencies to uncover why this final connection remains incomplete years after the rest of the route opened, and his findings are extremely frustrating.
The needed connection is very short, spanning a half a block at most from where 28th Ave S abruptly ends and the regional trail just a couple hundred feet beyond. The land the path needs to travel through is already flattened down by people walking and biking across the grass, a clear sign that a pathway is needed here. Also known as “cow paths,” informal walking paths like these show transportation agencies where unmet facilities exist in the communities they serve.
This 2017 construction notice said the “pathway improvement” was coming in 2018.Looking south toward the greenway’s end (photo taken in 2016, but the area sadly hasn’t changed much).
This grass is part of WSDOT’s lid over I-90, which created Sam Smith Park and is home to the I-90 Trail. The I-90 Trail is a major transportation facility of regional importance that includes investments from many agencies along its route including WSDOT. The trail connects some of the state’s largest employment and residential areas. Yet Packer’s reporting shows that WSDOT has put up major road blocks for at lease half a decade to prevent SDOT from building a short trail connecting the local biking and walking network in southeast Seattle to this regional backbone.
“A set of emails obtained by The Urbanist reveal the long battle between SDOT and WSDOT to come to an agreement around use of the property,” Packer reports. “That battle has continued into 2021, when a lease agreement was on the verge of being signed between the state and the city early this year, but city staff were surprised to find that the proposed agreement would have committed SDOT to paying nearly $24,000 per year to WSDOT in perpetuity (tied to inflation) after paying to design construct the trail connection itself.” (more…)
The Union Street bike lanes being used to haul freight up the hill. Riders, led by Joseph Roberts, on a Pedaling Relief Project food rescue mission, delivering donations from PCC to the Byrd Barr Place food bank. We hauled 675 pounds of food that day.
East Union Street now has protected bike lanes from 14th to 26th Avenues, providing a lower-stress way to climb the unavoidable ridge that peaks around 18th and 17th Avenues through the Central District.
Before the new lanes were installed, skinny paint-only bike lanes appeared and disappeared seemingly at random along the route. Now they are consistent, traveling between the sidewalk and parked cars. The bike lanes also calm traffic, which can get going pretty fast down the steep hill. People driving used to swerve into painted bike lanes to pass turning cars (and cars stopped to let people cross the street). The new design makes crossing the street significantly more comfortable.
The bike lanes are well-used heading up the hill. Downhill use is a bit more mixed, which makes sense. People who already bike in the area are used to bombing down Union’s steep hill. The new bike lane requires users to brake and go a little slower. I don’t see this as a problem, though. People have choices now. If you like bombing the hill, take the lane like before. But if you’d rather take your time, then use the bike lane. It’s great to have different options for different people.
Thanks to people who pushed back on the original design, the bike lanes continue through the intersection with 23rd Avenue. This provides a comfortable bike connection for people traveling from east of 23rd, but it also provides a connection to the many destinations at the intersection itself.
To celebrate the new bike lanes, Central Seattle Greenways is inviting everyone for a Sunday ride. Meet 10:30 a.m. at the little park at 15th and Spring. Details from Central Seattle Greenways: (more…)
The latest upgrade to the bike connections around the Fremont Bridge make some very significant improvements, though larger solutions are still needed to make it truly comfortable for people of all ages and abilities.
The Burke-Gilman Trail is the region’s busiest bike trail, and it travels under the Fremont Bridge, which is the region’s busiest bridge for biking. So connecting the two is a very obvious, high-demand need of regional importance.
The biggest changes are new protected bike lanes for most of N 34th Street between Fremont Ave and Stone Way, an extended bike lane for people biking north across the bridge, and a much larger sidewalk extension for trail users at Stone Way. These are all significant improvements.
N 34th Street already had painted bike lanes, but they were fairly skinny. Worst of all, the westbound lane was located in the door zone of parked cars and was often blocked by people making deliveries or dropping off passengers. The redesigned bike lanes make these few blocks much more comfortable.
Large numbers of people transfer from the Burke-Gilman Trail to N 34th Street and Stone Way, making that intersection one of the most important and complicated intersections in the city’s bike network. Trail users often stack up on both sides of the intersection waiting f0r the walk signal. So SDOT significantly extended the sidewalk and curb near Solsticio Café, providing more protected space for people to wait and to navigate around each other. (more…)
