Seattle has made a lot of big improvements to biking using voter-approved funds from 2015’s Move Seattle Levy. That levy ends this year, but voters have the chance this November to approve an even better version to replace it.
Cascade Bicycle Club and Seattle Neighborhood Greenways have both endorsed the 2024 Seattle Transportation Levy and joined the Keep Seattle Moving campaign to approve Prop 1 on the Seattle ballot. They are co-hosting a leisurely ride from Beacon Hill Station to Rainier Beach Station highlighting some of the improvements in place thanks to the Move Seattle Levy as well as potential future improvements if voters approve the next levy.
Explore Seattle’s latest biking infrastructure with Cascade Bicycle Club and Seattle Neighborhood Greenways! Join us on a ride celebrating the safer bicycle routes created through the Move Seattle Levy, showcasing the improvement that make it easier and safer to bike around Seattle. Along the way, we will highlight upcoming project planned under the Keep Seattle Moving Levy, offer glimpses into the future of Seattle’s bicycle infrastructure.
We will meet at the Beacon Hill Light Rail Station and end at the Rainier Beach Light Rail Station. Be there, ready to go at the time listed above. We will start with a required safety briefing, and roll out when that’s done.
The area around South Prairie has since changed from this map. The orange segments are now complete, but the green section between them is now closed due to the Spiketon Ditch Bridge closure.
The celebration begins 11 a.m. Saturday (September 28) on the Buckley side of the bridge. The Foothills Coalition, parks departments in both counties, and the cities of Enumclaw and Buckley are hosting the event.
Until next summer, the bridge will mostly be useful for connecting Buckley and Enumclaw, which is a great outcome on its own. Congrats to folks in those communities because this will be a huge improvement over trying to walk or bike on the SR 410 bridge (Google Maps won’t even suggest walking on SR 410, so it currently sends people on a 30-mile walk just to travel the 3.5 miles between the two communities). These two places will be a comfortable 20-minute bike ride apart.
But the larger benefit will come when Pierce County Parks plan to finish work on two trail bridges, one between Buckley and South Prairie and one between South Prairie and Orting. So next summer, the Foothills trail should connect from Puyallup to Enumclaw along one of the most scenic rail trails in the world.
Because most of the new bridge’s structure is on the King County side of the river, King County funded $12.8 million of the $16 million project thanks to the King County Parks Levy. The rest of the funding came from Pierce County Parks and the City of Buckley.
The intersection of Stone Way N and N Northlake Way.
UPDATE: SPU wrote to say that as of Friday morning, the intersection detour returned to its previous state. “I’m writing to let you know that SPU removed the detour today at 7 a.m.,” spokesperson Brad Wong wrote. “This specific area has returned to the status it’s been for the past six weeks. The removal was part of the project workplan. We expect to fully reopen the intersection of North 34th Street and Stone Way North in mid to late October.”
The detour in place as of Wednesday afternoon (September 25) to get people walking and biking on either N 34th Street or the Burke-Gilman Trail has no crosswalk and no curb ramp, leaving users of the region’s most popular trail without any clear direction or safe option to get to the other side.
I just happened to be riding down N 34th Street today when crews were changing the detour at the intersection with Stone Way N and the Burke-Gilman Trail. They routed us down the sidewalk and onto N Northlake Way, a street without bike lanes or consistent sidewalks. There was also no clear way to get back onto the trail on the other side of the closed intersection. But hey, maybe I was just there are the wrong time. So I swung by a little bit later after the fences and everything were set up, but the problems were still there.
There is no ramp on the northeast corner of Stone Way and Northlake Way, creating a challenge for accessibility and bicycling. Reinhard Spiegelhauer, a German public radio reporter, was interviewing me about bicycling in Seattle when we came across this detour, so he’s taking a photo of me taking a photo, which is very meta.
All trail users are routed down to the intersection of Stone and Northlake. Not only are the sidewalks very skinny, but the sidewalk on the east side of the intersection has no curb ramp, so there is no way to get a bike up or down to the road level without hopping the curb. There are also no markings at the intersection to designate a crosswalk of any kind, and there is no stop sign for people driving. Trail users are basically just told to disappear. Here’s a rough sketch I made from memory:
Not to scale, obviously.
Confident bike riders can hop the curb and bike with traffic on Northlake, but what about everyone else? The Burke-Gilman Trail is an accessible route designed for people of all ages and abilities, and this detour is one of the worst I’ve seen in a while. Especially since the solutions seem fairly easy.
At a minimum, there needs to be a temporary ramp on the east corner, and a coned-off walking and biking area along the north side of the Stone/Northlake intersection so that people walking and biking can follow the shortest and simplest route around the closure. The hedges are also quite overgrown along the east sidewalk, constraining the already skinny sidewalk space and reducing visibility. Stop signs and perhaps coned lanes for westbound traffic on Northlake would also be wise since this is now a very confusing area, and the driving route no longer follows the lines painted on the road (see the top photo). It’s not immediately clear to anyone where they should be going, but I noticed that people driving westbound were not stopping. There is already a stop sign for eastbound traffic.
The thing is, Seattle Public Utilities already knows all this because they have been creating Burke-Gilman detours for this project for years at this point. I’m not sure how this one slipped through their process. Seattle Bike Blog also did not receive a construction detour notice, which has been common for this project in the past and makes me think this one didn’t go through all the usual steps.
Hopefully fixes can come quickly before anyone gets hurt, and changes can be put in place to catch these things in the future before they go into effect.
I am very pleased and humbled that Biking Uphill in the Rain was named as a finalist for the award, and I’ve been having a great time reading through some of the other great books on the list. I’m dual wielding Egan’s book and memoir finalist Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, and then I’ve got fiction finalist I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer by Robert Lashley on deck.
So if you’re looking for a good read as the nights get longer, go check out the winners and finalists.
A biking, walking and transit bridge is so much quieter and more pleasant.
As something of a last hurrah before the school year began, my kid and I took a trip down to Portland for no purpose other than to have fun. So we needed to travel by what may be my favorite method: Taking the train with a folding bicycle.
Our Brompton folding bike is not just any folding bike. It also has a simple attachment that allows us to also carry a kid. My first-grader barely fits, her knees just inches from bumping against the handlebars. So this trip was also the last hurrah for this kid seat set-up, which has served us very well (thank you Ben, a Seattle Bike Blog reader who gifted us this seat after his kid grew out of it). I previously hauled her up the gravel Cascades to Palouse Trail to go camping and see the Snoqualmie Tunnel.
Unlike the camping trip, our trip to Portland was all about combining transit and biking. We packed all of our stuff into one big Brompton bag (a Swift Industries Gilman bag, sadly discontinued) that fit on the front so that getting on and off the train was as simple as detaching one shoulder bag, folding the bike, and then carrying them on as luggage. We started by biking to the Link station in the morning to take the train to King Street Station. On light rail, the kid struck up a conversation with a woman who told her there were giant cat statues all around Portland and then showed her photos of a few of the cats she found when she was there recently. My kid was immediately more interested in these cats than any of the ideas I had floated to her in the days before we left, and she kept talking about them for the rest of the journey. This is one more reason why transit is amazing. These kinds of community interactions just cannot happen when you drive.
There is now a complete and connected protected bike lane on Pine Street from Melrose Ave to 1st Ave. It addresses the awful intersection with Boren Ave and as of this past week includes a bike lane through the brick-paved section near Westlake Park.
There is now a painted line through the crosswalk area directing people on bikes to the new curbside bike lane. A row of planter boxes separates the bike lane from a handful of on-street parking spaces for loading or taxis only. During my observations, these spaces were mostly being used by people making deliveries, though uses will change during other times of day.
The new design addresses an issue through this brick section where there was space for multiple lanes of traffic but no lane lines or rules to control use of the space. So if there were a backup of cars waiting to turn right onto 4th Ave, for example, people heading straight would merge to the left to go around them. The problem is that people biking were also trying to use that left “lane,” leading to conflicts and scary close calls. Under the new design, people on bikes can fully avoid the merging issue, which feels much more comfortable. I’m not sure I would have felt comfortable letting my 1st grader ride through here on her own bike under the previous design, but now I would. That’s the power of all-ages-and-abilities bike lanes, if a first grader can comfortably do it then so can most other people.
Bike riders will need to look out more closely for people crossing the street, especially if they walk between the parked cars. Visibility is reduced as a tradeoff in the new design, an issue that can only be fixed by either restricting or removing the loading zones. Hopefully this proves to not be an issue, but it’s worth observing closely in these initial weeks to see if adjustments are needed.
