In a significant change of tone, considering Seattle Times editorial board writers as a group, Jonathan Martin this week wrote an elegiac piece arguing that bike infrastructure “means more than paint on the road.” Elegiac, because it followed the death of 54-year-old Lance David, who was killed while biking into work Wednesday morning, and also, in a lesser sense, because Seattle seems finally to be turning its back on an era of painted-on bike “safety” measures. (A memorial ride for David takes place today at 3 p.m.)
Writes Martin: “The Downtown Seattle Association has joined with SDOT and King County Metro on Commute Seattle, which promotes better commute options into downtown, including a cycle track. Business support will be critical, because a cycle track will likely come at the cost of on-street parking.” To see what a cycle track looks like, visit this Seattle Bike Blog story about a newly opened NE 65th Street track that joins the Burke-Gilman Trail to Magnuson Park.
To fill in a missing Interurban Trail link, Seattle’s Department of Transportation is at work on another track on Linden Avenue N, which will use a small curb for separation from traffic, rather than the concrete barriers on NE 65th. On Capitol Hill, Broadway’s streetcar project will also include a cycle track. Not waiting for the city, Amazon is building its own track on 7th Avenue.
Not that long ago, in fall of 2011, you could count on the Seattle Times for both sober journalism about cycling deaths — like that of Mike Wang, while riding “in” a painted bike lane — and mockery of “Mayor McSchwinn” for his addlepated pro-bike stanc. Because cycling, that was for kids, hipsters, and Europeans, and it went without saying that for anyone of import, certainly a mayor, commuting by bicycle was infra dig.
Meanwhile Seattle was featured in The Economist as the “bike-friendly” city that was strangely content to regularly let cyclists be struck down. Painted “instructions” — whether bike lanes or sharrows — kept the heated conversations around bike safety that sprang up again and again after injuries and deaths focused on who was to blame for not following those instructions: the driver or the cyclist.
It is probably no accident that Martin’s Twitter bio mentions he’s a biker himself, or that the Times‘ transportation reporter Mike Lindblom, who also bikes, spotted back in 2008 the dangerousness of the area where Lance David was killed. This is shoe-leather journalism, even if technically it’s bike-tired. In contrast, perpetuators of the “McSchwinn” meme have often announced that they were on a bike “once,” and tend to insist, in the face of the thousands of cyclists actually doing it, that Seattle’s climate and geography prevent bike commuting, and so everyone must drive. In fact, more than 40 percent take the bus; only about one-third admit to driving alone.
Back in February, Mayor McGinn made a point of acknowledging the city’s shift in thinking: “We are updating our Bike Master Plan, with a focus on separated cycle tracks, and a network of safe neighborhood greenways,” he said. Clearly, every day counts.
