Luca

After an unprecedented number of hours reaching out to community groups, industry and commercial stakeholders, and the public at large, the Bicycle Master Plan update is finally in the hands of the City Council.

The plan represents an impressive and unprecedented amount of community input and expert consultation on challenges and opportunities to make Seattle the best city for bicycling in the nation. It includes an innovative vision for Seattle streets that encourages health and economic prosperity in every neighborhood, with an emphasis on reaching low-income areas that bear a disproportionate number of traffic injuries and deaths.

It is quite likely the best bike plan in the nation. As Mayor McGinn’s office sends the plan to the City Council today, it is just one step away from gaining approval.

Map shows multi-modal corridors where bike plans overlap with transit/freight. The plan includes a framework for making sure all uses are preserved

The plan represents many compromises. It’s not this bike blog editor’s dream plan, but that’s probably a good thing. Potential conflicts with transit expansion plans or freight mobility were taken seriously by the plan’s authors, and that should give the plan credibility. It is not only bold, but also realistic. It was not created in a bikes-only silo, but conferred constantly with the freight advisory board and heavily referenced the existing transit and pedestrian master plans.

The plan dramatically improves on the important-but-flawed 2007 Bike Master Plan.

“Probably for its time, it was just fine,” said outgoing SDOT Director Peter Hahn. The 2007 plan has been widely criticized for focusing on encouraging people on bikes to share lanes with car traffic on busy streets (thus, the reason so many busy streets have “sharrows” painted on them). “Due to compromises at the time, sharing lanes lead to some friction.”

The new plan focuses on protected bike lanes and neighborhood greenways to create a connected network of bike routes that will be comfortable to people of all ages and abilities while also improving neighborhood safety in general and reducing all types of traffic collisions. Hahn hopes this focus on reaching out to all Seattle residents — not just those brave enough to bike mixed with heavy traffic — will garner the plan “tremendous support across the community.”

“Certainly, there were some elements of controversy and probably will continue to be, but this is our best shot at it,” he said.

Adopting the plan does not come with a fiscal note, but it will put pressure on incoming Mayor Ed Murray and the new City Council to come up with a plan to adequately finance improvements and stay on track to complete most or all of the plan within 20 years. To that end, Mayor McGinn is urging the Council to adopt the goal of incrementally growing the budget for bicycle-related improvements from the current rate of $7-12 million to $20 million. From McGinn’s letter to the Council:

I also propose that the City Council set an annual funding goal of $20 million, which will be required to implement the improvements identified on the bicycle network plan map over the next 20 years, according to the planning-level cost estimate for plan implementation. In recent years, annual funding levels for bicycle facilities have been between $7 million and $12 million. With potential opportunities for bicycle funding increases in a renewed Bridging the Gap Levy, renewal of the Parks and Green Spaces Levy, a new local funding option approved by the legislature, continued availability of grant funding, as well as an improving economy, an incremental increase to $20 million a year is an attainable policy goal.

The raw total price tag for 474 miles of new and upgraded bike facilities clocks in between $391 million and $524 million. That estimate is full of caveats, though, and should not be taken at face value. It includes all elements of implementing the plan, including staff time and elements of projects geared toward the safety and access of other modes, such as improvements for people on foot. It also does not factor in the fact that SDOT’s biking and walking program has a great success rate at securing grants to assist with costs.

That price also excludes the reality that a great many of these projects will happen in conjunction with other projects (repaving projects, utility work, etc) in which the costs would be shared. The Broadway Bikeway, for example, largely paid for itself because it was built on top of a bunch of utilities that the First Hill Streetcar project would have otherwise needed to move. SDOT is actually pretty good at combining projects to maximize the investments from other city work.

And, of course, the “cost” of these bike projects does not factor in savings in the form of increased economic activity often accompanying high quality bike projects as well as the cost savings associated with a healthier population. And what is the value of saving lives from traffic violence? It’s hard to place such values into an economic context.

Here’s the plan’s cost breakdown:

Moving forward, the City Council, which has been active in the development of the plan from the start, will discuss the plan through December and will hold a public hearing. They expect to vote in early 2014, meaning the Bike Master Plan might be one of the first major documents to bear Mayor Ed Murray’s signature.

Of the thousands of comments received on the plan, NE 65th Street received by far the most attention. The plan includes a NE 65th Street option that is an attempt at compromise, though it will likely disappoint some people who bike in the area and some neighbors who opposed any protected bike lanes at all on the street. During community outreach, the option they went with was known as Option C.

The plan also changed plans for protected bike lanes on Stone Way, instead planning a neighborhood greenway on Woodland Park Ave. These changes were made at the urging of several neighborhood groups.

For our coverage of how the plan got to this point, see our BMP archives. Stay tuned for more details on changes, which we will post once we get a digital copy of the plan.

UPDATE: Here’s the schedule going forward, via SDOT:

• SDOT presentation and discussion with the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board (SBAB) on Wednesday, December 4
• SDOT presentation to City Council Transportation Committee on Tuesday, December 10
• Special meeting of the City Council Transportation Committee on Wednesday, December 11 to take public input on the recommended plan
• Additional deliberations by City Council on the recommended plan will occur in early 2014; dates of subsequent meeting will be posted on the project website.

Below is the full system map. You can download the full plan from the SDOT website.

Click here to download the PDF map and other plan documents

Beth Gunn returned home from vacation to discover something devastating: Her bike was no longer in the bike parking area of her Queen Anne apartment building where she left it locked up.

“That’s my car, that’s how I get around,” she said over coffee recently. “I don’t have money for a new one.”

Frustrated and now on the verge of being late to work at one of her jobs, she ran to work. When she had the chance, she reported the theft to Seattle Police and emailed Seattle Bike Blog to ask what else she can do to get it back. That’s when she found her ride listed on — yep, you guessed it — Craigslist.

Screenshot of Craigslist ad for her stolen bike

But Beth would not need to set up a fake buy or plead with police to help her catch the person who took her wheels. Instead, a little serendipity and a lot of thief stupidity created a magical moment: Waking down the street near her apartment, she saw her bike headed toward her strapped to the front of a RapidRide D bus.

So she did what she had to do: She stood in front of the bus and told the driver she wasn’t going to move until she had her bike. Luckily, the man behind the wheel is a bike commuter himself who writes a blog about biking and transit. You might know Matt Leber better as VeloBusDriver.

As soon as she started talking to Matt about the bike, a couple people exited the bus through the rear doors. Indeed, when Matt asked the passengers if anyone owned the bike on the front, nobody answered. They waited for a King County Metro supervisor, who gave Beth the OK to take the bike.

Beth, Matt and I got together for coffee recently to talk about what happened and celebrate her reunion with her wheels. She said she felt bad about making everyone on the bus wait, but Matt and I assured her she did the right thing.

Plus how cool is that? I’ve heard of a couple bikes being stolen off the front of buses in other cities (though I can’t recall hearing of it in Seattle), but I’ve never heard of someone recovering their bike that way.

Good work Beth, Matt and King County Metro for making this happen!

Unfortunately, Beth said at least three other bikes are missing from her apartment building’s bike parking. Though her building manager is considering installing more secure bike parking, for now she is hauling her bike up to her apartment for safe keeping.

The Fremont Bridge bike counter tallied its one millionth bike trip early Sunday morning, a little more than 13 months after it was activated.

But perhaps even more exciting, SDOT reports that bike traffic over the bridge is up 28 percent versus October and November 2012. Indeed, every weekly count since passing the one-year mark has seen higher bike use than the same week last year. It will be interesting to see if this pattern is maintained over time, but it’s a very promising start.

Click for the city’s interactive graph

In some ways, this is when the bike count data starts to become really rich with information. We have never had this depth of bike trip information before, and the opportunities to crunch the data are immense (if that’s your thing, you can access the raw hourly count data via data.Seattle.gov).

Previous bike count methodologies varied wildly year-to-year, and Census data only captures work commute trips and has too wide a statistical margin of error to provide dependable year-over-year comparisons. A common problem with Census and hand counts was that bike use seemed to fall a little some years, and grow a lot other years. In reality, bike use was probably growing gradually, and the ups and downs were mostly just statistical noise. The Fremont counter will give better clues about what bike use trends actually look like.

Microsoft will fund a walking and biking bridge over Highway 520, connecting the western part of their campus and the 520 Trail to the future location of the Overlake light rail station.

The software giant has agreed to contribute $33.3 million dollars toward station-related work, the majority of it going to the biking and walking bridge. The agreement, which would be the company’s largest ever expenditure on a transportation project, still needs to go to the City of Redmond and the Sound Transit Board, the Seattle Times reports.

If all goes according to schedule, the walking and biking bridge could open as soon as 2020, three years before the light rail trains begin running. But that’s just fine for Microsoft. The bridge will not only help connect people to the light rail station, but it will also help knit together the company’s already bike-loving campus. From the Times:

“Over time we think it’s probably going to double the amount of ridership on the light-rail line,” said Jim Stanton, Microsoft senior community-affairs manager.

The bridge, to be located south of Northeast 40th Street, also would help knit together a 388-acre campus where nearly 40,000 employees work in buildings divided by a freeway, Stanton said.

This expenditure is the latest in a Puget Sound regional trend, with tech companies pitching in to help make their campuses more friendly for biking and walking. As part of a deal with the City of Seattle, Amazon will fund study and a portion of construction of protected bike lanes on 7th Ave in the Denny Triangle area.

It’s encouraging to see more and more public-private partnerships helping to accelerate biking and walking projects. After all, employees and/or customers want to walk and bike more, so it makes lots of sense for companies to help speed up needed safety and access projects.

Anyway, here are some more hot and steamy bike/walk bridge porn concept images:

Seattle’s belated entry into protected bike lanes has definitely made a splash. In fact, the national Green Lane Project recently created a list of the top ten protected bike lanes of 2013, and Seattle made the list … twice.

Linden Ave clocked in at 5th, and Cherry Street made the list in the 9th spot. And, notably, Portland made the list zero times.

The Linden Ave Complete Streets project was definitely innovative for a US protected bike lane project. Seattle held no punches, utilizing a wide variety of design elements to create seamless and easy-to-understand bike lanes that feel safe and inviting to more people.

The protected lanes were part of a project aimed at increasing walking safety and ADA accessibility in the growing neighborhood with a large senior population. So Linden is not only a great place to bike, but it is also an excellent demonstration of how protected bike lanes can help make a street more comfortable and safe for everyone whether they bike or not.

The Green Lane Project cites Linden as a world class design inspired by Vancouver, BC. While other cities are building fast and cheap, Seattle is showing what happens when you “do them up nice the first time.”

See video and coverage in our previous post.

The Cherry Street protected bike lanes are short and on a steep hill. They are not flashy or high-budget like the Linden lanes. Indeed, the primary reason they made list is not due to the design: It’s how they came to be.

From the Green Lane Project:

Any other one-block uphill stretch of protected bike lane beneath a highway viaduct, one block from the second-tallest building on the West Coast, would be nothing more than a pretty good idea. But Cherry Street’s protected bike lane makes our list because of who suggested it: a pair of anonymous safety-minded community members calling themselves the “Reasonably Polite Seattlites” who spent $350 of their own money to install these bollards in the dead of night, then sent the city an email to explain why. The coolest thing of all: after removing the temporary installation, city planners realized the activists were right and installed a proper version themselves.

The illegal bike lane that demonstrated the idea. Image from the Reasonably Police Seattleites

Let’s keep this momentum going. With the complete opening of the Broadway Bikeway coming early next year and plans on the way for miles of protected bike lanes through the downtown core, Seattle is positioned well to keep turning heads and grow its reputation as a top US city for innovative, people-focused streets.

The choice is clear: There is no choice. Seattle must invest in better transit and bike lanes if the city wants to grow. Here’s a moving GIF from 2nd Avenue in downtown Seattle that demonstrates why.

Inspired by this GIF that has been making its way around the web, I took the images from the Commuter Toolkit poster i-Sustain made about seven years ago with sponsorships from Seattle, King County and a bunch of other transit agencies and private organizations. You can download the poster here.

This image answers the question of why Seattle should invest in protected bike lanes. In addition to making the street safer and more comfortable for people walking, biking and driving, protected bike lanes actually add capacity to the street. The image demonstrates how a bike lane can carry an entire traffic jam, but that will only happen if it is safe and comfortable enough for people of all ages and abilities to consider using it.

This is how protected bike lanes will revolutionize downtown Seattle and allow our state’s largest employment center to continue adding jobs.

The image also, of course, demonstrates the power of transit. Building a subway is like moving an entire traffic jam into a smoothly-running train underground. And without our buses, Seattle would have stopped growing a long time ago. Many of you would not even be here reading this blog. You would be in some other part of the country or world where you found work and a place to live.

Sitting in traffic is awful. Indeed, the first image in the GIF probably looks pretty familiar. And I understand that to people sick of sitting in traffic, it seems counter-intuitive to use any road space currently reserved for cars on transit, biking or walking instead. But it is the only way we will ever increase the ability for more people to move around our city and get where they’re going.