Watch: City Inside/Out takes on Seattle’s slashed bike plans

Seattle Channel’s City Inside/Out produced a quality segment on the city’s recent bike plan cuts and the public protest against them.

The episode begins with a five-minute intro report outlining how the cuts came about and what people protesting the changes think about them (Spoiler: They don’t like ’em). The intro features interviews with Davey Oil of G&O Family Cyclery, Shirley Savel of Familybike Seattle, Cathy Tuttle of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, Councilmember Sally Bagshaw and my amazing partner in life Kelli Refer of Cascade Bicycle Club.

Yours truly is on the panel discussion that follows, along with SDOT Project Development Director Darby Watson, Councilmember Mike O’Brien and Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board Member Phyllis Porter.

In the end, SDOT is promising to get back to work on the downtown network when in the next month when the Center City Mobility Plan released a report on future bus mobility needs. Meanwhile, I pushed for the city to hit the ground running and make some major connections to 2nd Ave in 2016 (specifically, north to the new Westlake bikeway, east to Broadway or at least the bike lanes at 9th and Pine, south to Dearborn and west to the Alaskan Way Trail that heads towards West Seattle).

Cascade has launched a petition pushing for four main points needed to make sure the bike plan gets back on track:

1. Revise the Bicycle Implementation Plan to prioritize the Center City Bike Network and complete the build out of the network as soon as possible
2. Fix streets that currently don’t work for people by making short term safety improvements on our most dangerous streets
3. Prioritize connectivity by filling in key gaps within our current bicycle network
4. Make the multimodal corridors identified in the Move Seattle Levy (e.g. Eastlake, Madison and Rainier) truly multimodal, with protected bicycle lanes, neighborhood greenways and safe connections for walking

During the panel, I for some reason went into a video game analogy at one point. The analogy falls apart when you realize that Seattle Process would be the worst-selling video game of all time. “Experience the thrills of slowly growing a movement, reading multiple drafts of 400-page urban planning documents and listening to hours and hours of public testimony spread out over half a decade, all while loved ones in real life are put at risk just getting around the city in … SEATTLE PROCESS! Rated M for Mature.”