Tag Archives: bike lane

News, Transportation

Seattle Drivers Not Sure if They Have Hit Everyone Yet

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Accident-plagued Dexter is one of SDOT’s most heavily-reconfigured streets. (Photo: SDOT)

Who knew that a lack of rain would make Seattle drivers even worse? At midnight, record-keepers will be marking into the books the first all-dry July in 50 years. But along with the terrific weather has come an alarming rise in cars colliding with bikes and pedestrians.

Is it just more people taking to their bikes in the good weather? Seattle’s Department of Transportation told the Seattle Times last year that: “When more cyclists are present, motorists become more conscious of them and safety tends to improve.”

Yet the City Council’s Richard Conlin is nursing a broken shoulder blade, after a driver flipped a quick U-turn in front of him and Conlin rode into the vehicular barricade. Though the driver was cited for making an illegal U-turn, Conlin’s recap of the incident — “He wasn’t looking, I probably could have been a little more defensive” — exhibits what Sightline’s Alan Durning calls “car-head.”

Conlin could have been killed in the accident (you just have to fall the wrong way after being launched over the handlebars), but he’s equating the driver’s carelessness with a multi-ton, motor vehicle with his own responsibility to avoid being crushed by a car. It’s a transportation version of Stockholm Syndrome; Conlin later released a statement in which he reassured everyone he doesn’t “expect this accident to influence my work on transportation issues or alter my perspective on cycling.”

In Durning’s case, he’d biked right into a red Jeep Cherokee parked in the bike lane on Dexter. He was berating himself for being an inattentive idiot when he thought, Wait a minute, this is a bike lane. If the driver had parked his car in the middle of the road and walked off, and Durning had driven his car into the back of it, would he have been thinking, My god, what a klutz I am?

“Car-headed as we are in North America,” writes Durning, “we don’t enforce traffic laws in ways that hold drivers accountable for the risks they impose on cyclists and pedestrians.” The driver who sent Conlin to the emergency room will have to pay a $124 ticket.

Not everyone has Conlin’s health insurance and wherewithal. Brandon Blake also had a driver turn in front of him on Dexter, and “suffered several fractured ribs, bruising to his lungs, face fractures in several places and a concussion.” Friends and family have started an online fundraiser to help deal with the bills.

Each time Seattle Bike Blog reports on one of these major incidents, you learn of a multitude of “little” accidents that weren’t reported — each a potential fatality.

Blake, a Sounders fan, has something in common now with 33-year-old Sounders defender Taylor Graham, who tweeted on July 29th: “If you are the car that just hit a guy riding his bike on Dexter and took off, that was me.” One of the replies to that tweet was from Eric Cockrell, who had his own two bits to put in: “car hit me before the Denny light on Dexter yesterday.”

News, Transportation

Seattle’s War on Cars Fails, Again, to Achieve Predicted Nightmare Outcomes

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(Image: SDOT)

With a full year of traffic data under their belts, Seattle’s Department of Transportation is reporting on how the Nickerson Street “road diet” affected traffic. Average weekday traffic was down one percent, to 18,300 vehicles from 18,500. SDOT has not been able to find evidence of diversion to alternate streets.

On the safety side, the primary reason for the rechannelization that converted the four-lane road into two lanes, collisions were down 23 percent compared to a five-year average, the speeding population dropped 60 percent, and the number of people doing 10 or more miles over the speed limit was down 90 percent.

The $242,000 project included pedestrian crossing improvements at three locations, smoothing a sharp curve, a two-way left turn lane in the middle, and an uphill bicycle lane. Though Nickerson was Seattle’s 28th road diet (as of March 2012 we have had 36 battles in the “war on cars”), the proposal was met by substantial outrage from people who argued that a four-lane road could not be reduced to two lanes without traffic volume being cut drastically.

On neighborhood blog Magnolia Voice, the community appeared split on the viability of a change that, remember, had been successfully implemented 27 times since 1972:

A survey we took back in June indicated that, of the 711 who participated, 48.4 percent were in support of the road diet, while 51.6 percent were against the plan.  The topic generated more discussion on this site than any other topic we have ever posted.

At the time, the City Council’s transportation committee chair, Tom Rasmussen, wanted to delay the project “until 2016 — when other corridors including two-way Mercer Street and the Alaskan Way Tunnel are completed, and their traffic detours let up.”

UPDATE: Rasmussen’s office has written in, claiming that he was incorrectly characterized in the Seattle Times: “The reference to waiting until 2016 for changes to Nickerson came from a letter from Mayor Nickels when he was in office that Tom was paraphrasing at the MDC meeting in 2010. Tom was never advocating for waiting. He was only interested in receiving more information from all viewpoints to be able to make a subsequent decision if the city council decided to weigh in.” You can decide if “receiving more information from all viewpoints” would result in what’s more prosaically known as waiting.

The Manufacturing Industrial Council (MIC) also complained that freight mobility would suffer. (Freight use of Nickerson Street post-diet hasn’t declined at all–it’s actually up slightly.)

Because bicyclists were for the proposal, it had to be bad for cars. A Crosscut guest editorialist opined that “Losing lanes to bikes will produce a jobs exodus.” And things went from there. KING 5 included road diets in their “war on cars” segment. “The Emerald City has been put on a road diet,” proclaimed FOX News.

SDOT actually tried to mollify people by pointing out that many of the changes simply involved paint, and if it didn’t work–if this 27th Seattle road rechannelization didn’t work–they could always switch it back, and people could return to traveling at in-city speeds that kill pedestrians. A year later, it’s not as easy to find people arguing for SDOT to road binge.

News, Transportation

The Economist to Seattle: Car Speed Kills

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ghost cycle #8 (Photo: our Flickr pool's Chris Blakeley)

When the Seattle Times calls Mayor Mike McGinn, sneeringly, “Mayor McSchwinn,” for his support of bicycling and bicyclist safety efforts, you may or may not laugh. You may want to point out that the road-diet-plus-bike-lane combination was implemented heavily by the mayor the Times lauds for his farsightedness.

When an ideologically stoked backlash to road diets appeared this time last year Seattle’s department of transportation argued they’d been doing road rechannelizations since 1972. But certainly the road diet as we know it got a boost lately from the Bridging the Gap levy, as SDOT recounts:

In 2007, SDOT worked with the Mayor and City Council to codify the Complete Streets policy in ordinance number 122386, which states that “SDOT will plan for, design and construct all new City transportation improvement projects to provide appropriate accommodation for pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and persons of all abilities, while promoting safe operation for all users.”

In 2007, of course, Seattle’s mayor was Greg Nickels.

But you may also feel pained at the Seattle Times‘ callousness. Bike safety is a serious thing: life and death, in fact. Seattle has thousands of daily bike commuters, the Seattle Times editorial board aside, and bike infrastructure and bike safety mean a great deal to them.

The Times opinionators can apparently shrug a death or two off, if it means they get to make fun of a mayor they dislike. To The Economist cycling deaths made Seattle stand out. When they went looking for an example of the dangers of cycling in the U.S., they picked Seattle as the Goofus:

Nearly 6% of commuters bike to work in Portland, the highest proportion in America. But in five out of the past ten years there have been no cycling deaths there. In the nearby Seattle area, where cycling is popular but traffic calming is not, three cyclists, have been killed in the past few weeks.

The Seattle Times covered cyclist Mike Wang’s death, which happened a few blocks from Seattle Times offices. Then Ron Judd went on to mock Mayor McSchwinn a few more times. Being “for” bicycling is funny. It’s not as if there’s a real problem.

Here’s The Economist again:

…consider the death of Michael Wang. He was pedalling home from work in Seattle on a sunny weekday afternoon in late July when, witnesses say, a brown SUV made a left turn, crunched into Wang and sped away.

The road where the 44-year-old father of two was hit is the busiest cycling corridor in Seattle, and it has clearly marked bicycle lanes. But the lanes are protected from motor vehicles by a line of white paint—a largely metaphorical barrier that many drivers ignore and police do not vigorously enforce.

Well, economists have no sense of humor. One of the motivations behind SDOT’s complete streets is an attempt at what The Economist recommends: traffic calming. SDOT has simply been trying to get drivers to obey the speed limit on boulevards and arterials. The Economist writes approvingly of a 20-mph limit where cars are near bicycles, “a speed that, in case of collision, kills less than 5%.”

I imagine that’s cold comfort to anyone in that five percent, but at just 30 mph, the fatality rate (for cyclists and pedestrians) has skyrocketed to around 45 percent. Optimally, I believe, you wouldn’t have bicycles in contact with cars in a hurry: see Portland’s bike boulevards. (If you have an oft-ignored “Slow: Children Playing” sign on your street, why not talk to the City Council’s Sally Bagshaw about a pilot program?)

But no matter how you look at it, I think it’s time to stop ignoring the fact that there are lives on the line in this discussion. Reasonable people stop sniggering when people are dead.