This is a reminder that the City Council is holding a public hearing about the Bike Master Plan Wednesday, perhaps your last chance to submit comments on plan before the Council votes on it early next year.

The hearing starts at 5:30 p.m. in the City Council Chambers at City Hall. If you can’t make it to the meeting, Cascade Bicycle Club has created a handy online tool to submit comments to the Council.

As we reported before, the Bike Master Plan draft is not this blog’s dream plan. It shies away from some of the most challenging streets in the city with transit or freight uses.

But that is probably a good thing. It is the result of the many, many hours of outreach the authors conducted, and is evidence that such outreach was not just lip service. This is not just a bicycling advocate’s dream list, it’s a realistic guide to bike-focused safety and access investments in Seattle.

The Bicycle Master Plan is a multimodal transportation plan that will increase safety and comfort for people driving freight trucks, driving cars, walking across the street and riding a bike.

The plan also represents an incredible amount of community-driven work, with many projects gathered by resident-organized neighborhood greenway groups across the city. In this way, the plan represents both city-wide network needs and neighborhood-level needs. Whether you are heading to work across town or heading to the grocery store for milk and bread, the plan has ideas to make your life easier and safer.

With safety and comfort for people of all ages and abilities, geographic equity and network connectivity as major guiding principles, the plan includes 474 miles of high quality infrastructure changes to make bicycling more appealing and accessible in every Seattle neighborhood. Combined with education programs, the plan is a guide to dramatically increase the number of people in Seattle who see bicycling as an appealing way to get around town.

This is not a plan for just the brave, fast and fearless, it’s a plan for everyone. Seattle is lagging behind its potential as a cycling city due to dangerous streets and vital missing links in the bicycle network. This plan addresses those needs and presents a vision for a safer, healthier, happier, more sustainable and more economically vital Seattle with room to welcome the influx of residents and jobs heading this way.

Seattle needed this plan years ago, but it is finally here. Let’s pass it with gusto, then fund it. No more holding ourselves back. This is our chance to show the nation what the American city of the future actually looks like.

For more on the plan, here is presentation given to the Transportation Committee Tuesday morning (video should be online soon via Seattle Channel):

transportation20131211_1a by tfooq