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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.
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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.
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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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. 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.
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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.
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Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 2025-26 SDOT budget (PDF) had to be written assuming the 2015 Move Seattle Levy will expire at the end of 2024 without a replacement. So it is a grim look at how SDOT’s work would be gutted if voters do not approve the Seattle Transportation Levy (Proposition 1) on the November ballot.
“With fewer financial resources available, SDOT will focus on capital project delivery for existing work and commitments made in the levy,” the budget overview notes. “Less will be spent on maintenance and preservation of assets (roads, bridges, transit, pedestrian and bike facilities), while innovations and system enhancements will be delayed to a future time when more resources are available. This slowing of maintenance and asset preservation work will affect transportation safety, mobility of goods and services, and climate and environmental goals.”
The expiring levy has provided $103 million per year, and the only way to craft a budget without that $103 million is to slash pretty much everything. The result is a budget that focuses on the non-optional functions of the department like moving bridge operations, emergency weather response, court-mandated accessibility fixes, some safety elements of the Vision Zero program, fixing dangerous road deterioration, and keeping lines painted. Investments to get ahead on road maintenance, expand the bike network, maintain or improve trails, fully rebuild roadways (rather than simply adding yet more patches), complete seismic retrofits for bridges, provide bus and streetcar operating costs, or build new sidewalks would all be slashed hard. SDOT staffing would also be reduced, which would harm the effectiveness of essentially every department team.
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Last week, I published a story recapping a wonderful train plus folding bike trip my kid and I took to Portland shortly before the start of the school year. Though we had a great time biking around and exploring the city together, I was surprised by the lack of complete and connected protected bike lanes downtown. Especially since so much of the city’s biking experience is very friendly and low-stress, it felt incongruous to be biking in mixed traffic on busy downtown streets. So I noted, “Seattle is learning for itself what Portland learned previously: Many more people will bike if there is a safe and inviting space to do it. Has Portland forgotten its own lessons?”
Jonathan Maus over at the venerable Bike Portland responded yesterday with a recap of some of the frustrating behind the scenes political and institutional struggles that have gummed up progress on downtown bike lanes. As I assumed, the city has been working on plans for all ages and abilities bike routes through downtown for more than a decade, and they’ve even funded a plan in 2016 called Central City in Motion. But then, well, most the bike stuff didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, some of which make sense and some of which do not.
So what happened?
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