Seattle Bike Blog

Saturday: Celebrate the new Green Lake bike lanes with a community ride and scavenger hunt

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

July 29, 2021

Join local safe streets groups and SDOT Saturday for a community bike ride celebrating the opening of the Green Lake bike lanes.

Meet up 10:30 a.m. at the Flamingo parking lot of the Woodland Park Zoo to ride with the group to the Green Lake Community Center for “kids activities and refreshments” from 11 to 1. Also, project staff will be on hand to answer all your various questions, such as, “Why don’t the bike lanes connect to N 77th Street?” and “Can the bike lanes please connect to N 77th Street?”

You can get a preview of what it’s like to ride in the new bike lanes by watching Seattle Bike Blog’s video tour.

More details from SDOT:

Inaugural Bike Ride
Our week of fun begins with an Inaugural Bike Ride which will start on Saturday, July 31 at 10:30 AM. We are starting in the Flamingo parking lot of the Woodland Park Zoo located at the corner of N 50th St and Phinney Ave N. We’ll ride along the expanded bike lanes on N 50th St and then proceed north on Green Lake Way N to the new two-way bike lane! We’ll end the ride at the Green Lake Community Center where there will be kids activities and snacks from 11am to 1pm. Project staff will also be on hand to answer your questions about the new improvements.

Scavenger Hunt – Enter to Win!
In addition to the Inaugural Bike Ride, we are also hosting a week-long scavenger hunt to explore all the multi-modal improvements made around Green Lake and Wallingford, with items like our new rapid flashing beacons for pedestrian safety on the list!

To participate, post a photo of yourself completing any of the scavenger hunt activities with the hashtag #GreenLakeScavanger on Twitter or Instagram to be entered to win a gift card to one of our local participating businesses. Each activity post will give you one entry. Scavenger hunt is open from Saturday, July 31 to Sunday, August 8.

tags: green lake, sdot

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Lee Lambert named Executive Director of Cascade and Washington Bikes

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

July 27, 2021

Lee Lambert. Photo courtesy of Cascade.

After more than a year since their last Executive Director resigned, Cascade Bicycle Club and its sister organization Washington Bikes have selected their new leader. Lee Lambert will take the reigns of one of the largest statewide bicycling organizations in the nation starting September 12.

Lambert has been the Executive Director of City Year Seattle/King County, a non-profit AmeriCorps organization working to help local students. Before that, he was the Director of the Washington STEM Network, founder of the Washington College Access Network and a staffer for Senator Maria Cantwell and Representative Adam Smith.

He grew up in Tacoma and has been biking his entire life, according to the Cascade press release. He will be the first Black Executive Director in the organization’s history.

Lambert takes over an organization that is rebounding from a year in which the pandemic forced them to cancel nearly all their major events and furlough a lot of staff members. Interim Executive Director Christopher Shainin has led the club through this time, which is still not over. The club’s biggest events like the Seattle to Portland Classic, the Ride from Seattle to Vancouver and Party, and the Emerald Ride will not happen in 2021.

Hopefully, Lambert will be able to oversee a 2022 in which the organization can finally get back to full-speed (though that may rely more on the state of the pandemic than on Lambert).

More details from the Cascade press release: (more…)

tags: cascade bicycle club, lee lambert, washington bikes

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Dongho Chang leaving SDOT to be State Traffic Engineer at WSDOT

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

July 26, 2021

Chang (blue jacket in front) on a 2012 community bike ride discussing options for safer streets in Ballard.

Seattle is a better city because of Dongho Chang. There may not be another public servant working in our city in the past decade who has had a greater impact on so many people’s everyday lives. Since 2012, Chang has forever revolutionized what it means to be a traffic engineer in our city by bringing a level of personal care and genuine love for his community that has made him something of an unintentional local hero. He has had a direct impact not just on the physical shape of our streets but also on the culture of SDOT’s professional staff.

Chang is leaving SDOT to become State Traffic Engineer for WSDOT, the agency where he started his career before working in Everett and then Seattle. His last day at SDOT is September 15. This is wonderful news for Chang, WSDOT and communities around the state.

Many people may know Dongho Chang best from his Twitter feed, an oddly compelling tour of new and old transportation infrastructure around Seattle. But to me, it’s never been the content of the tweets that was impressive, it’s the reason he is visiting all these sites in the first place. Chang is constantly observing and learning, noting how people actually use the city’s infrastructure (regardless of the intent behind the design). As City Traffic Engineer, his job could technically be done almost entirely in an office by looking at plans and reviewing engineering manuals, yet he is seemingly everywhere. He takes the real world outcome of his work seriously and personally, and simply satisfying the rules in a dusty engineering manual is not good enough for him. The solution needs to actually work for people, and observing it in action from as many perspectives as possible is the only way to know if a design has succeeded. So when he posts a tweet about a new bike lane or signal or whatever, that’s probably what he’s doing.

Chang also genuinely listens to community feedback, and I have never once seen him assume the posture that he knows better because he is a high-level professional traffic engineer. He doesn’t get defensive, and he’s not too proud to take another look at a design to make it better. Perhaps the best example, and the story that first brought him national attention, was the way he responded to the Reasonably Polite Seattleites and their 2013 guerrilla bike lane on Cherry Street. He didn’t chide them for breaking the law by gluing plastic posts to the newly-painted bike lane. Instead, he thanked them, apologized that SDOT had to remove the posts, and then offered to return them. Then he made their design permanent just a few months later by installing officially-designed posts. (more…)

tags: dongho chang, sdot

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Saturday: Fairview Ave N Bridge reopens with a car-free celebration

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

July 22, 2021

Construction work is wrapping up on the new Fairview Ave N Bridge, finally bringing an end to a long closure of a major bike route between South Lake Union and Eastlake.

The bridge opens to all traffic Sunday, but people walking and biking will be able to cross starting Saturday. SDOT is hosting an opening celebration 9:30–11:30 a.m. Saturday.

The old bridge was closed back in September 2019. I suppose if this important route was going to be closed for so long, a pandemic was a good time for it. The detour via Aloha Street adds a significant amount of climbing to the route, so the bridge reopening will be very welcome.

Concept images from an SDOT presentation.

The new bridge will have a two-way bikeway that operates similar to the old bridge, but the sidewalk will now be separate from the bikeway. Ideally, SDOT would have taken the long time they had during this closure to build a bike connection on Fairview between the bridge and Lake Union Park, but they did not. So for now, people biking on this wonderful new bike path will again have the no-win choice of either squeezing onto the west sidewalk or mixing with general traffic. (more…)

tags: eastlake, fairview ave n, sdot, south lake union

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Endorsement: Lorena González for Mayor

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

July 20, 2021

Photo courtesy of the Lorena González campaign.

Leaders like Lorena González don’t come along often. She has been a stable, very progressive compass during a very tumultuous time in Seattle history, and the Council has shifted around her as voters continue to elect people who stand for bold changes. But the forces supporting the city’s inequitable and unsustainable status quo have managed to occupy enough power to hold back the progress voters want. Seattle has a big opportunity to finally change this dysfunctional dynamic by electing a mayor who will say Yes to change and has demonstrated the community-building and government executive skills to make it happen.

González is a potent mix of ambition and effectiveness, and she won citywide elections in 2015 and 2017 by large margins. It is still very difficult to win a mayoral election in Seattle if you are not the preferred candidate of the Seattle Times and big business interests. But González has already shown that she knows how to lead a worker-focused, progressive campaign that can win citywide.

Biking, walking and transit has never been González’s top issue, but she has always been on the right side with her Council votes. She even spoke to the 2019 protest at City Hall against Mayor Jenny Durkan’s bike plan and safe streets cuts (watch starting at 19:15 here). But perhaps just as importantly, she has demonstrated that she is a decision maker. That would be a huge breath of fresh air compared to our current indecisive mayor. González is also unafraid of asking direct and tough questions, drilling city department leadership if she senses rosy numbers or any other B.S. This is exactly what Seattle needs from a mayor who will craft our city’s next big transportation levy, which should be queued up for the 2024 ballot. González has what it takes to put a levy to voters that is bold, realistic and trustworthy. (more…)

tags: 2021 primary, lorena gonzález

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Seattle’s next mayor will have an enormous impact on the future of biking and safe streets

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

July 15, 2021

NOTE: The 2021 primary election is August 3. The deadline to register or change your address online in King County is July 26, but you can register and vote in-person through Election Day. Don’t procrastinate! It’s summer, and August 3 is going to come up fast.

This map shows the ambition of the 2015 Move Seattle levy. All this was supposed to be funded, and it’s walk/bike/transit focus inspired strong voter approval. What will the next mayor’s vision look like?

The 2021 election is likely the most important Seattle election since 2015 for safe streets, bicycling and walking.

The next mayor will lead the development for whatever follows the Move Seattle transportation levy, which expires at the end of 2024. Developing the levy requires the mayor and the City Council Transportation Committee to work together with a shared vision, but the mayor will likely be the primary public-facing leader of the effort. Because the city has been following a 9-year transportation levy renewal system, the next levy vote happens to coincide with a very high turnout Presidential election. Seattle will have an incredible opportunity to pass a very bold and ambitious funding package, the kind of effort that sets a new standard for what local transportation funding can accomplish.

But the next mayor will have an enormous amount of work to do before the 2024 vote because they will be inheriting a heap of problems and public distrust. Mayor Jenny Durkan has squandered her time in office, failing to deliver the promises that Move Seattle made to voters back in 2015. Biking, walking and transit promises were dramatically scaled back, and a lot of the people that Seattle will depend on to pass another transportation measure are angry. At the same time, the West Seattle Bridge fiasco has understandably frustrated a lot of people.

So the next mayor will first need to restore public trust in the Department of Transportation and in the city leadership’s willingness and ability to maintain our infrastructure and follow through with its bold promises. They will have a couple years to turn things around before voters go to the polls, but they will need to get started immediately after taking office. This is no small feat, but it’s also very achievable. The next mayor will need to deliver some high quality and impactful projects from the Move Seattle levy plan that genuinely improve people’s everyday mobility. And they will need to be able to educate the public on the value of these investments.

In the years leading up to the next vote, the city will also need to reassess its transportation needs and priorities. This effort will help guide the creation of the levy. Before the 2015 vote SDOT and Mayor Ed Murray created what they called the Plan to Move Seattle. That plan was very exciting, but it has since proven to have been unrealistic without more funding than was available in the levy (partly because it did not predict an unfriendly Federal government). So Seattle’s next mayor needs to be both bold in ambition and realistic about cost forecasting. We will need a mayor that the voters will trust. (more…)

tags: 2021 primary, move seattle

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