It’s time for the Bike News Roundup! Here’s a spattering of transportation news from around the region and the globe. As always, this is an open thread.
First up, classic Bill Nye demonstrating the distance between planets by riding his bike (Spoiler: They are really far apart):
Pacific Northwest News
- Traffic on the Alaskan Way Viaduct Has Collapsed | Sightline Daily
- Your Housing Is More Expensive If You Have To Own A Car. Here’s How Much. | The Urbanist
- Fremont Bikers – Some cool data crunching.
- Two Maps Show How We Designed Walking Out of the Suburbs | Streetsblog USA – Phinney Ridge vs Bellevue.
- West Seattle road/trail safety: Re-envisioning Chelan/Spokane/Delridge/W. Marginal | West Seattle Blog
- TriMet to build fewer bike lockers and more covered bike racks at new transit stops | BikePortland.org
- 26th annual Seattle Bicycle Expo | Picture This | The Seattle Times
- Feb. 28: Give us your best shot: King County Parks wants trail photos for new regional trail map
- New $30M transit garage in SeaTac will have more than 1,000 parking stalls – Puget Sound Business Journal – Because clearly we have so much transit money that we need to start spending our surplus on car storage…
- One dead in South Seattle head-on collision | The Today File | Seattle Times
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Cascade versus @SNGreenways race off! pic.twitter.com/KAnA0yBrwC
— Cascade Bicycle Club (@CascadeBicycle) February 28, 2014
- Special report: How Portland stopped building neighborhood greenways | BikePortland.org
- Seattle News and Events | Bike Share Ed: Seattle Can Look to Denver
- Declining Traffic Through Seattle | Sightline Daily
- How Does Sound Transit Expand? | The Urbanist
- Update: Pedestrians hit by drivers in Junction, Westwood areas | West Seattle Blog
- Seattle Subway’s 2014 Volunteer Kickoff Party!
- Getting a fix on how to fix bikes | Picture This | The Seattle Times – Great photos of Bike Works in action
- Seattle takes step toward eventually replacing troubled Magnolia Bridge | www.kirotv.com – $300 million price tag is enough to complete nearly all of the 475-mile Bike Master Plan.
- SDOT Blog » It’s your money, where is it going? – Bridging the Gap update
- Mike O’Brien Rising | Seattle Met
- Improving the Grid in Capitol Hill | The Urbanist
- Gravel Grinding on the Snoqualmie Valley Trail – North Seattle Cyclist
- WSDOT Comes Through with Promised SR99 Money | Seattle Transit Blog
- Seattle growing faster than suburbs, first time in 100 years | FYI Guy | Seattle Times
- Lynch to plead guilty to lesser charge in DUI case | KING5.com Seattle
- Flying Bike Cooperative Brewery Seeks to Raise $300K with Member Investment Campaign – Washington Beer Blog
- How Vancouver’s Olympic Legacy Is Shaping the Future of Transit – Frances Bula – The Atlantic Cities
- Bertha vs. The Bus | Sightline Daily
- Transportation Nag: Not Dead! It’s a Living End!
- Frequent Transit Map Updated | Seattle Transit Blog
- More bike lanes for Yakima’s streets | Local & Regional | KIMA CBS 29
- Seized items trickle back to victims of alleged Capitol Hill theft ring as court case continues | CHS Capitol Hill Seattle – Bikes among things allegedly stolen
- Rules of the Road: Is it legal to speed when passing another car? | Traffic | The Bellingham Herald – Perhaps it should be obvious, but it is illegal to pass a car that is going at or above the speed limit.
- Washington state lists parks with bike/hike campsites » Biking Bis – A cloudy day is a great opportunity to plan a sunny weather bike trip
Halftime show! This one flashy bike tourism ad:
National & Global News
- A/N Blog . Before & After> 25 of New York City’s Most Transformative Road Diets
- Guerillas on Two Wheels | Biking Fitness Plans and Advice | OutsideOnline.com – Seattle mentioned as an example of how to do it right.
- How open streets on Sundays helped birth the Dutch bike movement | PeopleForBikes
- Offshore Wind Farms Could Knock Down Hurricanes – Scientific American
- Recycled plastic doodads make instant divided bike lanes | Grist – SDOT should experiment with these!
- President Obama puts a TIGER in transportation’s tank | Department of Transportation
- The gyratory at Wandsworth, among others, will be ripped out and replaced with two-way roads – London replacing dangerous roundabouts with more bike-friendly designs
- 2013: Another Year of Falling Per-Capita Driving in U.S. | Streetsblog USA
- Should electric scooters be allowed in bike lanes? They are now in Toronto : TreeHugger – Electric assist bikes: Yes. Higher speed electric scooters: No. A line should be drawn somewhere, and it should happen before too many people invest in scooters thinking they can ride them on trails and bikeways.
- Accident rates improving for older drivers | Nation & World | The Seattle Times
- Does the International Symbol of Access Need a Redesign? Roman Mars 99 Percent Invisible.
- Introducing the Essax Shark Saddle | Bicycle Business | BikeBiz – Hmm…
- The Future of St. Louis: Predictions for 2114 – – News – St. Louis – Riverfront Times – Featuring yours truly talking about the transportation mode of the future. Can you guess what it is?
- Who’s more dangerous: drunken or stoned driver? | Nation & World | The Seattle Times
- Bike history: In 1972, California warned against paint-only bike lanes | PeopleForBikes
- Cop cuffs fireman in crash site dispute | UTSanDiego.com – What’s more important at a highway crash scene: Helping the injured or making sure traffic keeps flowing? Apparently, your answer may depend on whether or not you’re an asshole.
- Will Obama and the GOP Align on Plan to Fund Transpo With Tax Reform? | Streetsblog USA
This is an open thread.
Comments
12 responses to “Bike News Roundup: Biking the distance between planets”
The real question with the traffic decline on the Viaduct is now that 48K trips are gone, will tolls in the tunnel even come close to paying off the tunnel??
Also the article didn’t mention the increase in bicycle traffic, not huge, but it’s also likely folks are riding vs sitting in traffic. Of course a really safe route would increase that option for far less money than the rest of this boondogle.
What kind of bike was The Science Guy riding? Looks like it has a ‘vertically split’ top tube…
Oregon biking vid: I thought the line (at 40 seconds in) was an elevation-profile, until the line went vertical…. Damn, that’s steep! LOL!
It wouldn’t surprise me if the “second” downtube is a spring-loaded pump. Road/touring bikes of that vintage sometimes had ones matching the frame.
Some taller bikes with big gaps between the down tube and top tube use a second top tube to restore the front triangle. Some smaller work bikes do the same. I don’t think Nye’s bike looks much like either of those. I don’t really know, though.
It’s a standard Bianchi with a frame-fit pump (probably a Silca Impero and probably with the Campagnolo solid brass presta head) in Celeste.
Bianchi owners of a certain vintage could be a little obsessive about matching Celeste components and accessories to their Celeste frame. I’m almost surprised to see the black saddle and bar tape.
Don’t they teach you kids anything in school these days?
I’m not sure what they taught us in school, man, I was playing games on my graphing calculator the whole time.
Two comments, taking advantage of the open thread:
1) Thanks to the UW grounds crew for heavily trimming the vegetation just north of intersection of University Way and the Burke-Gilman trail! I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve nearly been crushed by cars making right-on-red from University onto Pacific and pulling into the crosswalk illegally, at high speed. After a year of complaints to SDOT and the UW about this intersection, they finally trimmed back the shrubbery so that at least now I can see the cars coming before they plow into me. I still think a “no turn on red” sign would be appropriate here, because to do so requires crossing and stopping in a bike highway, but SDOT has thus far not responded to repeated requests.
2) What the heck is taking so long with the SDOT bike safety project in Ballard along NW 45th? It seems like a relatively straightforward project — some paint, a couple of new signs, no new lights or major infrastructure. And yet it’s still stuck in this kind of half-completed state after several months. Did anyone get a definitive answer about whether there will be a new 3-way stop sign at the intersection of 45th/Shilshole?
1) Agree about the no turn on red there. 2) I’ll follow up.
“New $30M transit garage in SeaTac will have more than 1,000 parking stalls – Puget Sound Business Journal – Because clearly we have so much transit money that we need to start spending our surplus on car storage”
That’s a little unfair, as people won’t be riding transit if they can’t park at a station. Not everyone has feeder buses to park and rides. Also, said park and rides tend to fill up incredibly early in the morning—such as Lynnwood where you can try to find parking at several P&Rs at 9:00 am and find nothing, resulting in having to drive in. My only problem with the transit garage is that it should have more parking to increase ridership on the train.
In terms of cost, space near the station, and use of public street right-of-way near the station, a parking space is a pretty expensive way to buy two train rides per workday. Big garages and the road capacity needed to serve them tie these areas into eternal car-dependence.
Eternal car-dependence is a luxury we can’t afford, and car-oriented suburbs aren’t an exception to be accommodated, they’re a majority of our region. Re-orienting them around more sustainable modes of transportation is one of the most important projects of every generation alive today.
Sure, that’s the long term. Should we not enable people to ride transit right now?
Not if we build infrastructure that gets in the way of what we’ll need in the future.
It’s all a trade off. Providing parking will definitely attract riders, but at $30million, that’s about $30,000 per parking spot, which is a pretty expensive way to get a rider for the day, not to mention any rush hour congestion the garage will cause. Imagine if we built an apartment building there instead, maybe we could still get those extra 1000 riders, but you’d also be getting new residents that frequent local stores and pay property tax, don’t add as much to the traffic jams by the station, make the block more attractive, etc.