Luca

With the help of a regional transportation grant, the city is in the early stages of planning a bikeway of some kind along the wide Westlake Ave N corridor. So far, the city has held one open house to gather ideas and feedback from all community members to help guide the design process. 81 percent of those who attended noted that reducing bicycle collisions should be a project priority.

There is no design yet, no details on how much — if any — parking would be displaced or how the bikeway would look and feel. But a handful of people are so mad about the idea that the city is even thinking about creating a safer Westlake Ave N for people biking that they have hired a legal team to delay the entire city-wide Bike Master Plan.

The Bike Master Plan has been in development since 2012, has gone through thousands of hours of community feedback, drew overwhelming support at a public hearing in December and is one City Council vote away from approval.

Well, it was one Council vote away, anyway. A crew of Westlake businesses and individuals hired Josh Brower — the attorney who has been successfully delaying the Ballard Missing Link of the Burke-Gilman Trail for many years — and have filed an appeal to the city’s determination that the Bike Master Plan does not pose a significant environmental impact. Unless the appeal is dropped, the Council will not likely vote on the plan before the scheduled March 5 hearing.

Why are they appealing, you ask? Because passing a bird’s-eye master plan that includes a desire for a protected bikeway of some kind, somewhere within the 150-foot corridor “will create unsafe conflicts between pedestrians, cyclists, and commercial/industrial/maritime/business traffic and activities; will create traffic and safety hazards in and around the City and Westlake Avenue North area and neighborhood; will cause loss of parking that is significant and adverse to City residents, business owners/operators and the Appellants,” according to the appeal filed with the Seattle Hearing Examiner. “The Appellants are … harmed by the significant adverse impacts from the Plan and the failure of the DNS to comply with the State Environmental Policy Act and its implementing regulations.”

Yes, the city just thinking about putting a protected bikeway on Westlake “harms” the appellants.

Yes, there is enough space on Westlake for both parking AND a safe place to bike

The Bike Plan consists of 473.5 miles of new and upgraded bike facilities. The plan is a high-level document meant to guide city investments to increase road safety and to make bicycling more inviting to more residents regardless of age, ability, race, neighborhood or income. Westlake represents about 0.3 percent of the plan.

But that’s not the most outrageous part of this appeal. The Westlake project received funding independently of the Bike Master Plan. In essence, all the Master Plan says is: “Hey, there should probably be a separated bikeway of some kind here.” It’s a document that helps the city decide which projects to look into further. But Westlake has already been chosen. If the appellants have a beef with the project, then their beef is with the project team, not the Bike Master Plan.

So basically, this handful of people are so mad about this one project — the goals of which have overwhelming community support — that they are willing to hold the entire city-wide Master Plan hostage. They are willing to hold hostage all those thousands of hours invested by residents in neighborhoods in all corners of the city either because they are confused about the role the Master Plan plays in that project or because they want to flex their legal muscle to show how serious they are.

So who are these angry, well-funded appellants? From the appeal:

The Westlake Stakeholders Group includes members from the Westlake community. The Westlake community comprises 300 floating homes and live-aboards; 10 marinas, which include approximately 1,200 moorage slips; 20 boat dealerships; 50 yacht repair/lift-out facilities; a kayak and paddle-board company; the largest floatplane port in the contiguous United States; a lake/bay tour cruise company; the only fuel dock on Lake Union; an indoor swimming pool 65,000 annual visitors; a dragon boat club; and a rowing club.”

The fact that they are calling themselves “The Westlake Stakeholders Group” ( website) is insulting enough, considering their intended goal is clearly not in the best of interest of the people who have been, or will be, injured while biking in the dangerous parking lot or four-lane road. Is Karlyn Beer not a “stakeholder” too? What about the people who live and work on Westlake and are excited about the idea of a safe and comfortable space to bike?

Do you bike, walk, live, work or play along Westlake Ave North? Then you are a stakeholder and may want to attend the January 21 “Westlake Stakeholders Campaign Kickoff.”

We were hopeful that people concerned about Westlake would engage in the planning process. Their concerns should obviously be part of the plan for a safer, more accessible Westlake corridor, neighborhood and business district. We all want Westlake businesses to do well, and we all want everyone to get around safely. We absolutely can work together to make that happen.

But these legal tactics, which now threaten to stall the entire bike plan for an unknown period of time, are despicable and show no intention of acting in good faith to create a safer Westlake. It’s frustrating to everyone who attended the open house, listened to concerns voiced there and tried to find common ground and compromises. I heard countless conversations after that open house like, “Hey, would back-in angled parking work? It takes up less space but still holds many cars.” “Maybe changing more unlimited free parking to 2-hour parking would cut down on people using the lot as a free park-and-ride, thus opening the parking to customers.” “Let’s make sure loading zones are preserved for businesses that need them.” “Let’s create better accessible parking for people with mobility issues.” And so on. These are the voices that should be leading the Westlake design process.

We urge the Westlake Stakeholders Group to come back to the table. To do that, they have to drop this appeal. Instead, they should spend their efforts working with the Westlake project team and the 81 percent of people who attended the project open house and said they want to improve safety for people on bikes. We can work together to create plans for a Westlake that works better for everyone, but not if one handful of the stakeholders decides to flex their legal muscle at every turn.

Below are the appeal documents.

UPDATE: Councilmember Tom Rasmussen, Chair of the Transportation Committee, said via email that he “was in the process of developing a schedule for review and action on the BMP” when the appeal was filed. He was able to find a thin silver lining in the delay, though. From an email:

What that means for the public is that there may be at least a month to provide comments to the City Council.  I would recommend that all who want to comment on the BMP get them in to the City Council within the next 30 days because we will want to have time to review the recommendations.  Once we receive the go-ahead to proceed with deliberations and adoption of the BMP update we will do so in a timely manner.

Comments can be sent to bmpupdate@seattle.gov or directly to members of the City Council.

Sdot Sepa Dnsappeal 12.23.2013 by tfooq

W-13-009 NOH_00001 by tfooq

Sunday’s Kidical Mass ride took us to Ballard for our first look at the new two-way bikeway for part of the Burke-Gilman Trail Missing Link. The paint isn’t down yet and I hope they’ll put more dividers in to make things clearer, but most of the signs are up. We only took it in the westerly direction, but I don’t think it’s marked yet from the other direction because we only saw bikes coming towards us on the car half (which is fine and in fact it’s still marked with sharrows…though those will probably be sandblasted off at some point).

Bikes approach from the Burke-Gilman Trail, next to a sidewalk (off frame to the left in my photo below). I hope diagonal paint will make it easy to access the bikeway entrance.

Here’s the new all-way stop as The Missing Link crosses 14th. I don’t come through here at commute time so I’ve never seen it busy.

More cones. I don’t know if there are plans to paint the whole bike half green, but I hope so.

The end of the bikeway is where I’d prefer to see stop signs. Shilshole is not easy to turn left onto. As for entering the bikeway from the other direction, slowing down to make the right turn in front of fast-moving cars probably won’t be very pleasant, either. I’m curious to see the finished product, but I don’t think any traffic calming is planned for this intersection.

But onto better things: Kidical Mass! We met up at Ballard Library and biked a block to the NW 58th Street Greenway and got a look at the new bike counter. This one doesn’t display a number like the Fremont Bridge bike counter, but numbers should be available online from SDOT next month. The two black tubes running across the street record bikes passing by.

Read about the rest of the January Kidical Mass ride on FamilyRide.

About Madeleine Carlson

Madi is Seattle Bike Blog’s Staff Family Cycling Expert. She lives in Wallingford and bikes all over town with her two kids in tow. You can read more of her adventures and thoughts on family life on two wheels at FamilyRide.us

Sound Transit operates many popular regional express bus routes connecting major employment and residential centers quickly and easily.

But, as express routes, getting from your home or workplace to the bus stop or transit center is often the most difficult part. Taking a slow local bus, then waiting to transfer is one way to get there. Driving to a park-and-ride is another.

But many people have figured out the best way: Bike there.

Unfortunately, for many popular routes, so many people want to bring their bikes on the bus with them that the racks are often at capacity.

Well, Sound Transit is trying to help by replacing nearly all their two-bike racks with new ones that can hold three bikes. And unlike the three-bike racks installed on King County Metro buses, the newer SportWorks model is easier to use (the arms that hold the bike steady tend to be less “sticky,” at least the couple times I’ve used them).

UPDATE: Sound Transit sent us a correction to their earlier statement that all buses would be upgraded: “One thing we should correct about new bike racks – they won’t be used on the MCI buses (some Pierce Co. routes).”

Bike use is growing so quickly in the Puget Sound region that adding one extra bike spot to each bus is not going to completely solve the bike %2B transit capacity issue. But it could very well save you from waiting in the rain for the next bus.

Bringing a bike on a bus is an awesome stop-gap solution for areas that are in the early stages of developing a culture of using bikes for transportation. Indeed, King County and Woodinville-based rack maker SportWorks pioneered the bike-rack-on-a-bus concept in the 90s. The concept is now in use by hundreds of metro areas all over North America. This might be one of the Seattle area’s most awesome and overlooked cultural exports.

But there is a clear problem of scale: A bus can really only carry a couple bikes, but it can carry a lot of people. If more than two or three of those people want to bring a bike, someone has to be left behind. Too many people wanting to bike is a good problem to have, of course, but it means that we need to come up with a more scalable solution.

Enter: Puget Sound Bike Share. With plans to launch in spring or summer, PSBS could provide public bikes near the end of trips in major destination areas and near transit centers. This way, there is no need for everyone to bring their own bikes on the bus.

Combine bike share with King County’s and Sound Transit’s recent investments in secure bike storage at major transit centers, and the bike + transit equation becomes a lot more complete.

On average, 106 people biked across the Fremont Bridge every hour in 2013, and so far the trend keeps climbing year-over-year.

We didn’t make it to 1 million trips in 2013, but we got close: 926,025. And at the current rate of growth in bike trips, it might not be too long before we get there.

The bike counter was installed in mid-October 2012, so we only have two full months of year-on-year data to draw from. But so far, the results are promising:

• Fremont Bridge bike trips in November 2013 were 17 percent higher than November 2012.
• December 2013 was 20 percent higher than December 2012.

The year’s bikiest day was June 4, which clocked 5,121 trips. June 4 also happens to be my birthday, so thanks for that awesome present, Seattle! If you are wondering what to get the bike blogger who has everything, try biking even more this year.

The Fremont Bridge counter is likely a good barometer for biking trends across the city because it is at a bike route pinch point next to a commercial area. There are [several other bike counters going in now][2], so that data will help give an even better picture of bike usage in the city.

The raw numbers, while fun to track, say a bit less than the year-over-year bike use trends. We will be following closely to see if the trend holds up over time. If it does, we could be celebrating 1 million 2014 bike trips some time this fall…

From SDOT:

SDOT now has collected a full calendar year of data from the Fremont Bridge bike counter, giving a better idea of the patterns of bicyclists in the corridor. The total number of bicycle trips counted for 2013 was 926,025, getting very close to 1M. The day when the most trips were counted was June 4, with 5,121 trips.

What day were the fewest trips counted? It was not the day when we had a couple of inches of snow, Friday, December 20. There were 739 trips on that day. Instead it was Christmas Day, Wednesday, December 25, with 371 trips, and that is up from December 25, 2012 when only 98 trips were counted.

The day of the week with the most trips was Tuesday.

On the average, there were 106 trips an hour, 2,537 a day, and 77,169 a month.

To see the data in graph form, go here

You no longer have to bike all the way to Fremont to get counted. The city — with support from the Rails to Trails Conservancy and the Mark and Susan Torrance Foundation — has installed seven new real-time bike counters around the city. This brings the city’s total to nine.

The new counters do not have a visual display like the ones already installed near the Fremont and Spokane St bridges, but the data collected will be the same and available online starting in February.

In addition to counting bikes, new counters on the Burke-Gilman, I-90, Chief Sealth and Elliott Bay Trails will count people walking, too.

Other counters installed in Ballard, Northeast Seattle and West Seattle will measure bike usage on neighborhood greenways, providing out first real data about how well they are being used and, importantly, how use grows as more people learn about them and they become better connected to the city’s bike network.

Details from SDOT:

Seattle is working to make bike riding a comfortable part of daily life for people of all ages and abilities. Toward this end the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is constructing neighborhood greenways, protected bike lanes and multi-use trails; installing signs to guide people to their destinations; and putting in bike detectors at traffic signals. By creating comfortable places to ride bikes and connections to parks, schools and business districts, we hope more people will discover the practicality and joy of bicycling.

The next step is to monitor our progress. SDOT recently added seven new bike counters (four of which also count pedestrians) to neighborhood greenways and multi-use trails. The counters are helping us create a ridership baseline in 2014 that can be used to assess future years and help us reach our goal of quadrupling ridership by 2030. Unlike the two existing bike counters on the Fremont and West Seattle bridges, the bike counters do not have electronic display totems. But that doesn’t make them any less valuable.

“It is important to use our limited funds wisely and data driven decisions help us do this,” said Kristen Simpson, SDOT Plan Implementation Manager. “Collecting bike and pedestrian data helps guide our investments and measure our progress while building a transportation system that gives Seattleites great travel options.”

“While these bike counters may not offer the instant gratification of being visually counted like the Fremont and West Seattle counters,they are an important addition to SDOT’s measurements of Seattle’s progress toward getting more people to travel by bike. The more data we have, the better we’ll be able to plan for and build a safe bicycling network for people of all ages and abilities,” said Jeff Aken, Principal Planner at Cascade Bicycle Club.

Three counters were installed on neighborhood greenways (see attached map):

• 26th Avenue Southwest at Southwest Oregon Street in Delridge
• 39th Avenue Northeast at Northeast 62nd Street in Wedgewood
• Northwest 58th Street at 22nd Avenue Northwest in Ballard

Seattle is building a network of greenways to give people healthy travel options and help move us toward our safety goal of zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2030. The counters consist of two small tube sensors stretching across the street, which are attached to a small metal counting box made by Eco-Counter. The tubes only count people riding bikes. They are very accurate and designed to be used on greenways.

Four counters have been located on multi-use trails (see attached map):

• Elliott Bay Trail in Mrytle Edward Park
• Burke-Gilman Trail north of Northeast 70th Street
• Chief Sealth Trail north of South Thistle Street
• Mountains to the Sound Trail west of the I-90 floating bridge

Multi-use trails link neighborhoods to business districts and create connections with recreational and natural areas within the Puget Sound region. Also made by Eco-Counter, these sensors count both people riding bikes and pedestrians. Separate volumes are tallied for each travel mode. Wires in a diamond formation in the concrete detect bikes and an infrared sensor mounted on a wooden post detects pedestrians. The counters also capture the direction of travel for both bikes and pedestrians.

Data from the counters will be downloaded at the beginning of each month. It will be uploaded to Data.Seattle.gov and be available for public use starting in February. All counts are recorded in one hour intervals and will include a total overall count and, as available, a directional count.

SDOT plans to install at least three more counters this year. Additionally, numerous one week counts will be conducted at selected locations throughout the city each year. The data from the permanent counters will enable estimates of annual bicycle volume to be calculated at the one week count locations.

Special thanks go to the Rails to Trails Conservancy and the Mark and Susan Torrance Foundation for funding half of the cost. The data counters installed on our multi-use trails will be used in the Rails to Trials Conservancy’s Trail Modeling and Assess­ment Platform (T-MAP). This is a $1.2 million, three-year initiative to create the next generation of trail planning data collection instruments, methodologies and analysis tools.

An exciting park restoration and mountain bike project in the Cheasty Greenspace on the eastern edge of Beacon Hill hit a roadblock last year: There is a long-forgotten Seattle Parks policy that prohibits bicycle use in parks.

At first, organizers of the Cheasty Greenspace Trails and Bike Park were hoping to overturn the policy, but there were concerns about making such a change in whole. Instead, the Parks Board will consider allowing the Cheasty project as a pilot, demonstrating how mountain bikers can help rehab and maintain the often under-used space.

UPDATE: The issue passed Thursday, giving the green light for the project to move forward. From organizers:

It’s on!!!! The Parks board recommended Cheasty as a pilot project for mountain biking in Seattle Parks, so it’s happening! It would have never happened without your support, enthusiasm, and dedication. So thank you all!

Back to original story:

Cheasty has a serious problem with invasive species and has few easy paths and trails, whether on foot or bike. The plan would focus volunteer hours on creating sustainable hiking trails, mountain bike trails and restoring the greenery.

If approved, it would also be a test to see how mountain bike trails, and the volunteer efforts they can draw, could be a solution for some other underused or invasive-filled areas. It would also be a good step to finding a way to balance acknowledging mountain biking as a legitimate and valuable park use while also making sure it does not diminish the parks for others (safe for dog walkers, strolls, children, etc).

From the Cheasty Greenspace Trails & Bike Park project:

Friends and supporters of the Cheasty Greenspace Trails & Bike Park project,

As you know, we, The Friends of Cheasty Greenspace/Mt.View have been on quite the journey with the City and Seattle Parks since submitting our rather dynamic proposal for use of the Rainier Valley’s largest contiguous forest for the 2013 Levy Opportunity’s Fund.  Our Opportunity Fund proposal was not funded due to an outdated Bike-Use Policy that prohibited bikes in natural areas.  Due to our unprecedented amount of support for introducing a new user group (mountain biking) to this space as well as removing barriers of privilege and access to both Nature and this sport, Seattle Parks formed a mountain bike task force this past summer to evaluate both the policy and possibilities of urban mountain biking in Seattle’s greenspaces.

In November, Parks presented a policy-change to the Seattle Parks Board of Commissioners, who requested a pilot/demonstration project for this sort of recreational use before signing off on a broad-base policy change that could allow mountain biking on designed trails in designated parks.  We have continued to work with executive Seattle Parks staff on this model and tonight they will be presenting to the Board that Cheasty Greenspace be considered as the perfect primary location for a demonstration project that involves both mountain biking trails and pedestrian walking/hiking trails.  This meeting will be held at 6:00pm tonight at Parks Headquarters 100 Dexter Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109.  This is a public meeting and you are more than welcome and invited to come and show your support!

This is very exciting to have this kind of support now from Seattle Parks for this kind of use in Parks lands, specifically in a community where daily access to nature in variable ways could transform the health and wellness of our children, youth and families.

Read the memo from Parks staff to the Board.