It’s time for the Bike News Roundup, a look at some of the bike stuff going around the web lately. This is an open thread.
First up, I was on Fox News recently, failing to apologize for Seattle’s “jihad” on cars. What a wonderful news network.
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Pacific Northwest News
- Jogger dies after being hit by a vehicle on Bainbridge | Kitsap Sun
- Why this Seattle organizer is diving into our city’s political past – The Evergrey
- All Good Things… – South Seattle Emerald
- Bike Plans: Aspirations & Actuality – Fancy Beans
- Would the Golden Gate’s ‘Road Zipper’ make Seattle’s Aurora Bridge safer? | The Seattle Times
- Sound Off: Proposed Island Transit fares don’t add up | Whidbey News-Times
- Car2go and ReachNow announce bike racks on Portland fleet vehicles – BikePortland.org
- 2018 Worst Intersection in Seattle: Rainier, 23rd, & Hill » The Urbanist
- Bellevue Invests in Downtown Bike Network with Protected Bike Lanes » The Urbanist
- Tukwila Opens New Ped Bridge – King County Parks Plog
- ‘Mean world syndrome’: In some Seattle neighborhoods, fear of crime exceeds reality | The Seattle Times
- Seattle’s App for Kicking Out the Homeless – The Atlantic
- Work set to begin to make John/Thomas intersections safer from Capitol Hill Station to Miller Park | CHS Capitol Hill Seattle
- 5 ways to make Seattle traffic less terrible | Crosscut
- As bike shares spread coast to coast, cities look to Seattle for clues on how to regulate the industry | The Seattle Times
- Don’t call it a comeback: Condos return to Seattle | Crosscut
- Victim remains hospitalized 4 months after hit-and-run in Seattle crosswalk – Q13 FOX News
- Did you read the fine print? We did. These are the rights you give up by renting a LimeBike or ofo | The Seattle Times
- $7 billion in funding approved for Vancouver region transit infrastructure – constructconnect.com
- Authorities search for suspects who struck cyclist and fled in Seattle | The Seattle Times
- Mercer Island Giving LimeBike a Try | Seattle Transit Blog
- Three dead in rollover on I-5, including child, grandparents | The Seattle Times
- Study shows Seattle has plenty of parking. So why can’t you find a spot? | The Seattle Times
- How reliable are those colorful bike-share bikes on Seattle streets and sidewalks? | The Seattle Times
- Man walking to stay healthy for his grandkids killed by hit-and-run driver in Kitsap County | Q13 FOX News
- Portland’s Scooter Tax Is Super High, and That’s Fine | Sightline Institute
- Mayor Durkan Refuses to Meet with Coalition Backing Center City Streetcar » The Urbanist
- The International Examiner – Why don’t more people bike in the Chinatown-ID? Lack of bike infrastructure makes them feel unsafe
- king5.com | Bainbridge boy conquers 200-mile bike ride despite hearing loss
- More protected bike lanes needed in downtown by 2020, Seattle City Council says | The Seattle Times
- Bird landing in Seattle? Job postings indicate electric scooter launch, despite city objections – GeekWire
- SDOT pushes equity as thousands more dockless bikes roll in | Crosscut
- Hit-and-run charge filed against driver in Rainier Avenue cyclist’s death | The Seattle Times
- Spokane freeway expansion costing hundreds of residents their homes | The Seattle Times
- Bike Lanes Are For Everyone: Fact-Checking Claims that Only “The Privileged” Want Safe Cycling Infrastructure | The C Is for crank
- Seattle Mariners Won’t Renew Safeco Field Lease Without County Taxpayer Funds | Seattle Weekly
- Morning Crank: Another Interim Head for SDOT, More Streetcar Fallout, A Victory for Burke-Gilman Trail Advocates, and “Tolling to Make Congestion Worse.” | The C Is for crank
- Closure on East Lake Sammamish Trail – King County Parks Plog
Halftime show! Seville shows how to make bug progress on biking in a very short period of time:
National & Global News
- Their Friend Died in a Hit-and-Run. Can They Take on Car Culture in Los Angeles? – The New York Times
- The Story of “Micro Transit” Is Consistent, Dismal Failure – Streetsblog USA
- Death on foot: America’s love of SUVs is killing pedestrians | Freep
- Police charge Bell Acres councilman with driving through crowd of protesters on North Side | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- The Power of Taking Up Space: Marshawn Lynch’s Oakland Rideout | KQED Arts
- Lyft Follows Uber Into Bike-Sharing Lane, Buying Owner of CitiBike – The New York Times
- 6 Times NHTSA Scolded Pedestrians When It Knew SUVs Were Killing Them – Streetsblog USA
- No, “Drunk Walking” Is Not Causing the Rise in Pedestrian Deaths – Streetsblog USA
- Why Detroit is the most expensive city in America to buy car insurance – Rate expectations
- Uber Will Rent Scooters Through Its App in Partnership With Lime – Bloomberg
- Mad About Bike Lanes, Baltimore Fire Department Takes It Out on Advocates – Streetsblog USA
- Bike-sharing company Ofo is dramatically scaling back in North America – Quartz
- For Bike Equity, Look Past Infrastructure – CityLab
- For nearly 20 years, duck boat safety recommendations have gone largely ignored | NBC News
- Uber’s e-bikes are cannibalizing rides from Uber’s cars | CNN Money
- Should there be mandatory driving tests for older drivers? | MNN – Mother Nature Network
- New Traffic Signals in London Will Give Pedestrians the Green Light By Default – Streetsblog USA
- Dockless scooters have landed. Here’s what that means – WalkBoston
- Court records show duck boat in Missouri disaster was designed by entrepreneur with no engineering training | LA Times – Ban the Ducks. If we have banned them after the Seattle disaster, this Branson disaster would not have happened. Let’s not make that mistake again. Ban them nationwide. But Seattle doesn’t need to wait for the nation to act. These things are deadly on land and sea. And when they kill, the kill a lot of people. This novelty is not worth so many lives.
Comments
12 responses to “Bike News Roundup: Fox News wishes I would apologize for Seattle’s ‘jihad’ on cars”
I want to move Seville now.
If you are a woman you don’t have to dye your hair bleach blond to get on Fox News — but it doesn’t hurt! Seriously, what is it with Fox News — they remind me of football broadcasts — either some overweight dude or a blond model. I guess it makes sense (know your audience).
In other news, I think Ms. Martinez (over at Crosscut) needs to check her assumptions as well. Specifically about people who ride: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13836150/the-power-of-taking-up-space-at-marshawn-lynchs-oakland-rideout. That’s freakin’ Oakland. Old Oakland. The kind of Oakland that gave birth to the Black Panthers and had regular visits from Cesar Chavez. Yeah, people of color ride. And they get hassled by the police way more than the white boys in spandex (not that there is anything wrong with white boys in spandex). The last thing they need are folks telling them they aren’t black enough, or Latino enough because they bike.
I’m surprised the Fox News “journalists” didn’t burn up from all the socialismz in our little hell hole up here!
Ugh. This really smells like an orchestrated campaign (a jihad on bikes?), feeding op-ed pieces to Newsweek and Fox, among others, this month. The mis-information in these stories has not been refuted by “data-driven” SDOT’s Director or by the Mayor, so perhaps they are happy to see these stories. The Fox story started with “late and over budget”. Those projects were not late. Over what budget? They did not give a budget v. final cost comparison. The 2nd Ave and 7th Ave projects are 10 to 20 times the cost of all the other “bike lane” projects in the city, but the stories do not mention the cost per mile of any other project. It’s like saying the Fairview Bridge project, which is costing $480,000,000 per mile, means we should not do any roadway renovation projects. Re-signalizing a downtown street, adding curbs and re-configuring lanes and overhead masts and signage, all at night with complex logistics and tons of engineering, is going to cost a lot more than a greenway street or a protected bike lane on a neighborhood arterial. Just like a bridge costs more than a roadway on dirt. But both are needed for safety and connectivity. 2nd and 7th are as muchg about pedestrian safety as bike safety, and everyone downtown is a pedestrian at some point in their day. The average PBL project is under $1.5M/mile. Repaving Greenlake Way is costing $6M/mile. So a few miles at $12M/mile is not a big deal. A lot less than a streetcar with similar ridership. Could SDOT and the Mayor step up and say so? Why does Tom have to do it alone?
When I see a phrase like “a few miles at $12M/mile is not a big deal” I realize just how out of touch some of you bike enthusiasts are. “Jihad on Cars” is typical Fox News verbiage, but what if the stimulus for this story was “an orchestrated campaign?” How did you get the city to sign on for so many millions of dollars worth of bike lanes to begin with? I think it was an orchestrated campaign, wasn’t it? It’s called democracy. And now there are people who are fighting back against what they see as your excesses. They’re practicing democracy, too. If, as you say, PBL cost is currently an average of $1.5 million, then they are costing roughly twice as much to build as the voters agreed to pay, so just consider yourself lucky that the people of Seattle allow any of your lanes to be built at all.
Feeling lucky!
However, not seeing many miles of protected bike lanes built here in West Seattle so far, or on my route downtown shared with lots of heavy trucks.
With the exception of Tom, the rest of the people interviewed for this excellent piece of video journalism sound like a bunch of crackpots. Jihad, really?
Fox news is vile nauseous garbage. When family members that you would otherwise care about spend their time holed up in a small town with Faux news on the television 24/7, it turns out that on the rare times you see them they start regurgitating the hateful mental diarrhea they have been immersing themselves in and they are painful to be around. Imploring them to subscribe to a newspaper or some news source that at least pretends to adhere to basic journalistic principles usually doesnt work. Its part of the reason we have the orange one as president and why life is getting shittier by the day for most of us.
A few years ago Fox ran some article about how SPD was overwhelmed buy druggies now that pot was legal.
Some crazy uncle called me up and asked how I could live in a city woth so mich lack of law and order.
You’re right, it is easy to dismiss Fox as nonsense but sadly a lot of people listen to it all.
Thanks for taking the unpopular side.
Pretty pissed those Duck rides are still running around after killing so many people. Seriously not cool. A classic case of greed over common sense.
Switching topics, I saw on the Seattle Urbanist that the proposed redevelopment of Northgate will restore the street grid in some areas currently covered by the mall. Just like how re-paving Seattle streets is the best time to advocate for installation of new bike lanes, this is a prime opportunity to advocate, very early in the process, for inclusion of protected bike lanes on every new street constructed / restored at the Northgate mall. It will take a community wide push to convince the City and County to require this from the developer, but this is the right community to make that push. If you have time, I hope you’d be willing to devote an entire blog post to this idea.
“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” ― Adolf Hitler. The bike lane portion of said streets costs orders of magnitude less than what Fox supposed “journalists” espouse. The bulk of the cost is for drainage, utility, structural, and other repairs and upgrades that make absolute sense when you have the road opened up and permits to close it down. I would love to see a site that uses map APIs to click on any road to see the funding source – property taxes, license fees, registration fees, user fees, gas tax, etc. This was the closest I found in a cursory search https://taxfoundation.org/state-road-funding-2017/. Does anyone know of such? How hard might it be? Seems like a great thing for cities, counties, and states to employ to increase transparency and understanding.