Bikeways

Bike's-eye video

New York City has some nice bike's-eye view videos (for a "Virtual Ride" of the new Manhattan waterfront greenway) -- an unbeatable way to show the realities of bikeways. I could see this type of thing being used in Seattle to: 1) communicate with decisionmakers who don't bicycle about bikeways, in a highly visual, dynamic way, and 2) give bicyclists route previewing capabilities for trip and route seleciton and for wayfinding.

Kayak trailer!

Bringing together two nonmotorized modes: bicycling by land, and kayaking by sea. Bicycle Alliance staffer Mark Canizaro, Chris King (Mr. Bypedal) and I collectively bought this beautiful semi-custom seakayak trailer made by Tony of Tony's Trailers in Victoria (on Vancouver Island). Tony was the last-place finisher in the Tour de France 50 years ago, and makes an excellent, superbly thought-through kayak trailer, besides being a really nice guy. As Mark and I assembled and test-rode it, we were impressed by the little, thoughtful features. And it rides great! Tracks amazingly smoothly, circles fairly tight (goes easily around Seattle's ubiquitous mini-circles, and feels only modestly heavy with a boat on it! See more fun photos here and here. Bringing together two peacable, local, noiseless, mitochondrial-combustion-engine activities into one seamless pair.

Action Plan for Bicycle Friendly Communities

Let's get Seattle's Mayor and other electeds to sign onto this Action Plan for Bicycle Friendly Communities, an effort of the League of American Bicyclists. The Action Plan is a resolution-like statement that calls on cities to recognize the health, environmental, and transportation benefits of bicycle-friendly communities and to take specific steps to achieve them. Big U.S. cities that have signed on include: Washington DC, Salt Lake City, Orlando, and New Orleans. Smaller cities include Santa Barbara and Palo Alto CA, York PA, and Columbia MO. European capitals Copenhagen, Berlin, Helsinki, and Dublin, and African cities Capetown, South Africa, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, are signed on following an international conference in March in DC, led by Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa -- a true visionary in the bike-friendly cities movement.

Some good news

After the urgings of many bicyclists, the City of Seattle agreed to ask WashDOT to evaulate a Madison Park bike connector in the SR-520 EIS in an October letter to WashDOT. Thank you signers Tim Ceis (Deputy Mayor), Grace Crunican (SDOT Director), and Councilmembers Richard Conlin and Jeanne Godden. Advocates Tom Bertulis, David Levinger, and Dave Hiller were instrumental in making it happen. Awesome!!

On an otherwise gutwrenching Election Day evening, there were some definite bright spots. In the 41st Legislative District, Democrat Brian Weinstein edged out State Senator Jim Horn, who has had an unfortunately narrow, motor-centric world view as transportation as chair of the Senate Transportation Committee in Olympia. Great job on the campaign to all who worked hard to make it so in that largely Republican suburban district. If Democratic Attorney General Chris Gregoire holds her lead to become governor after all the absentee votes are tallied, we can hope to see some modest forward progress on nonmotorized, active transportation in the state in the next two to four years.

Seattle Bicycle Facilities Collaborative

On Sept 14, thirty-five bicycle transportation champions convened at city hall as part of a Seattle Bicycle Facilities Collaborative. The group (as six subgroups) will go on bikeability tours, combine findings, then re-convene on Oct 12 to develop a prioritized list of bike facilities needs, including on-street striped bike lanes. Councilmember Conlin's office and the Bicycle Alliance of Washington convened the collaborative (quite likely inspired by the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board's tours, which were in turn inspired by national efforts). The product of the process will include a Bicycle Legislative Agenda for Seattle. I and others hope it will also help kick-start a Seattle Bicycle Master Planning effort, similar to Bicycle Master Plans that have brought such excellent on-the-ground success to other US cities within a relatively few short years, much aided by the federal ISTEA/TEA-21 legislation.

Madison Park SR-520 bike connector

Will the city urge WSDOT to assess a Madison-Park-to-SR-520 bike connector in the SR-520 environmental impact assessment? The connector was in the Trans-Lake study all along until a few NIMBYs, masquerading as citizens concerned about wetlands, started complaining about the idea. It's a logical, short connector to build to the planned bike lanes on SR-520 from their easternmost touchdown in Seattle. Lake Washington Boulevard, which starts not far from there, is the most historic and among the most family-friendly bikeways in Seattle. For the past 40 summers, Bicycle Saturdays and Sundays have brought families on bicycles to a carfree Lake Wash Blvd corridor on select summer weekend days. In 2002, a full 32,000 people participated. The connector is a logical commute corridor too, for Eastside workers and residents to and from downtown Seattle or residential neighborhoods in mid-city and all points south. Seattle: Just have WSDOT study the thing. That's what the EIS process is for -- that's how you'll know whether the connector will be environmentally impactful or not. And it always seems perplexing and ironic that in no road-widening EIS is the environmental impact of the actual transportation that the new facility will induce ever considered.

Bicycle Advisory Committees

Various cities, counties, metropolitan planning authorities, and states have bicycle advisory committees (BACs). Some include pedestrians in their scope. Most don't quite have the imprimatur that planning, parks, and other long-standing official boards and commissions typically have, but many places they are the core groups making the environment better for bicycling on the local level.

From the vantage point of Seattle's, it would be interesting to compare notes and ideas, so here are some links. The top ten towns in Washington state for sheer numbers of bike commuters per the Census, that also have bike advisory committees, are: Seattle (5,840 bike commuters), Bellingham (850), Spokane (740), Olympia (430), and Bellevue (230). Ellensburg (350 bike commuters), Vancouver (320), Tacoma (260), Walla Walla (250), and Bremerton (220) are top bike commuter cities either without BACs or BACs below Google's radar screen. WashDOT and the Puget Sound Regional Council have BACs. So do a bunch of cities near Seattle -- including Kent, Redmond (trails), Bellevue, and Bainbridge Island.

Of interest to me as well are other big-city BACs. More links up when I Google/surf these.

Burke-Gilman Trail section groundbreaking

City officials dig in at NW 60th St and Seaview to celebrate the planned and funded "terminus" (but not last) section of trail to be built over the next year. Cheers and thanks to all! Including the mayor and city council, the Friends of the Burke-Gilman Trail, the Bicycle Alliance of Washington, Cascade Bicycle Club, SDOT, WSDOT, PSRC, and especially, the people who have advocated for the trail since the early 1970s.

Fremont Bridge victory

After much interaction -- both handholding and headbanging -- with the civil engineers responsible for the the Fremont Bridge, Seattle bicycle advocates have scored a victory, achieving significantly better bicycle accommodation on the bridge approaches than was planned a year ago. I've been personally doggedly determined on this one, and have closely observed, photographed, and thought through the bicycle, pedestrian, and car interactions on and around the bridge. I even took a day trip to Portland to photograph good bikeable bridges, and many good ideas from there have made it into the Fremont bridge. All of which homework was very helpful in making all the little cases and points that come up in a discussion of a complex multimodal environment.

At the outset, the engineers were bike-naive and even bike-hostile. (As a rule, traffic engineers don't speak bike; car is their native and only tongue.) But as a result of advocates' emails to the director and mayor, organized by multiple bike groups and sent by scores of dedicated bike advocates, we were able to pry open a dialogue. Then, by engaging in hours of discussion, comment, criticism (objective, constructive criticism, of the product, not of people), over the months, we were able to gain, bit by bit, a better bridge. By no means what bicyclists would have designed, but within the context of the flatly stated limitations of the project, way better than the less-than-mediocre status quo.

Several learning points: Traffic engineers can be stunningly uninformed, but after a number of months of close-in intervention, they and their product can improve. (They are, after all, civil servants, and they are rational, if a bit obdurate, human beings.) Traffic/street design is surprisingly unrigorous -- it's amazingly hunch-based and open to trial and error. Considering what's at stake -- safety, health, community, differential allocation of public space to different users -- decisions are made in a rather stultified way. But the good thing about such a non-process process is that it can be influenced, in spite of itself.

Bike parking pix superset

The various bike parking photos in different albums are cloned and assembled here, in the album Bike parking superset.