Tag Archives: sally bagshaw

News, Transportation

Wallingford’s Greenway Gets a Grand Opening This Saturday

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Wallingford's Greenway signs (Photo: MvB)

Google Map of Wallingford's Greenway, created by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways

Wallingford's Greenway and parking area (Photo: MvB)

SDOT created Greenway lanes across a thoroughfare (Photo: MvB)

Greenway sign, meet green tree. (Photo: MvB)

Traffic-calming islands now come with sharrows (Photo: MvB)

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The official opening of the Wallingford Greenway, Seattle’s first, is this Saturday, June 16, at 5 p.m. The City Council’s Sally Bagshaw, a big greenways booster; SDOT Director Peter Hahn; and friends of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways will be there for a ribbon-cutting ceremony (at North 44th Street at Corliss) allowing Kidical Mass—pretty much what it sounds like—to pass through.

We’ve discussed the family-friendly residential streets movement before: “It changes the whole personality of the street when it’s safe enough for kids to bike on.” Wallingford’s Greenway gets high marks in that regard because it connects younger cyclists to Wallingford Center, Wallingford Playfield, Hamilton International School, and school programs in the Lincoln High School building–all on a much quieter route than the larger arterial, North 45th Street.

The completed section runs from North 44th Street and Latona Avenue NE to North 43rd Street and Stone Way. Signs marking the jog from 44th to 43rd are easy enough to spot.

SDOT sums up the work they’ve done (in 2012, they hope to install over eight miles of neighborhood Greenways in Ballard, Beacon Hill, Delridge, Wallingford and Ravenna/Bryant):

Traffic calming improvements include adding a green bike box(es) at 43rd/Wallingford, 44th/Latona, and 44th/Thackery; constructing a median at 43rd and Stone Way; adding on-street parking and installing signs to reinforce existing parking restrictions; as well as the addition of new directional signs and pavement markings.

On the other hand, you can see that this is a project that cash-strapped SDOT is trying to get done on the cheap. There haven’t been any significant reconfigurations of traffic–the route was no doubt chosen because it already included islands at the intersections, and SDOT hasn’t added any further traffic calming devices.

This is a thinner street than a boulevard, and with parking on both sides, bicyclists and cars proceeding the opposite direction will come head to head. (Parking on both sides also increases the chances of getting “doored” as a driver or car passenger flings one open in a cyclist’s path. SDOT actually added on-street parking, to appease residents.)

In a more perfect world, this street might be configured as one-way, and local-access only, with cars guided onto adjacent streets at each intersection, and only bikers and pedestrians allowed to use it as a thoroughfare. You’d want to see more substantive bike tracks–visible at a greater distance to cars–where it crosses busy streets. And on-street parking would be moved to pocket off-street lots, to create more room. It’s a start, though, and I’ll be interested to see if residents reclaim the street, as people have in Portland. Here are some visuals of how they’re doing greenways down south.

News, Transportation

Portland Has a Greenway They’d Like to Sell Seattle

"Ghost bike" (Photo: +Russ from The SunBreak Flickr pool)

“Greenway,” like “bike boulevard” is one of those terms that may hinder conversations as much as it helps–you always have to be on guard against tribalistic jargon. What’s wrong with just calling them family-friendly streets?

The general principle is to apply a little jiu jitsu to the bikes v. cars debate. Rather than trying to squish bikes and cars onto the same heavily traveled arterials all over town, you create stretches of family-friendly streets in neighborhoods by taking streets without much car traffic, and dedicating them to biking and walking first. Cars can still travel on them, but slowly, thanks to speed bumps.

It changes the whole personality of the street when it’s safe enough for kids to bike on. And it’s quick and easy, relative to other transportation solutions. On Thursday, September 22, you can get the details from Mark Lear and Greg Raisman, who are visiting the University of Washington (Savery Hall 264, 7 p.m.)  for a talk about Portland’s Neighborhood Greenways program.

In the span of just five short years, Portland will have transformed itself into a city where 80% of residents live within a half-mile of a “Neighborhood Greenway”–a special family-friendly street where it’s common to see families enjoying a bicycle ride together, kids walking to school or to the park, and even the occasional on-street basketball game.

Here’s a video that gives you a better idea of what it looks like.

Portland’s Bike Boulevards Become Neighborhood Greenways from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Anyone who’s lived in Seattle for very long knows that if you want to change something citywide, you have first to sell it to the neighborhoods. It’s heartening to see the bottom-up approach taking off. Here’s the requisite Facebook page for Seattle greenways organizers.

It’s also nice to have a City Council member who’s already been sold on the idea; Sally Bagshaw came back from a Portland trip having seen the greenway light. She’s created a whole page of information on how greenways work, and she underscores that greenways aren’t just about bikes:

Neighborhood Greenways are for all of us, not just for bicyclists. Greenways are for those who want to live in a quieter, calmer neighborhood. They are for those of us who want to let our children play outside safely, where neighbors like to walk and ride in front of their homes in relative peace. Greenways are for people who like green and flowering trees and want to recreate how their neighborhoods look and feel.

These family-friendly streets limit traffic speeds to 20 mph or slower, while reorienting intersection stop signs to give priority to cyclists traveling along them. (Someone must have suggested marking these streets Local Access Only, but so far as I can tell, that’s not implemented in Portland. It’s the speed of car traffic that’s being discouraged, not cars. As it turns out, that’s usually good enough at reducing traffic volume.

That still leaves, of course, work to do in areas where bikes and cars have to share the available road area, but if you consider how many people might prefer to bicycle around their neighborhood as opposed to across town, this seems to be a good low-hanging fruit approach.

News, Transportation

Cycling as a Uniter, Not a Divider

"Summer in Ballard," courtesy of our Flickr pool's Slightlynorth

Sightline’s post on the demographics of bicycling, “Who Bikes?” contains a response of sorts to that viral Vanity Fair article, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” by Joseph Stiglitz.

Stiglitz excoriates the pernicious effects of income inequality, concluding:

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

But when it comes to bicycling, the appeal extends through all income classes. And there’s nothing like nearly getting run over by an SUV to illustrate how your fate is bound up with how others live. (I know it’s irrational, but if I’m going to be hit, I prefer it be a Subaru.)

Now, certainly, biking is a more popular choice for anyone on a budget. Sightline’s Eric de Place says, “the biggest share of bicyclists isn’t yuppies, it’s low income people. In fact, the lowest-earning quarter of Americans make nearly one-third of all bike trips.”

But he emphasizes that bicycling is “remarkably evenly distributed” among the other three quarters. Said another way, the poorer half of the U.S. makes 52 percent of all bike trips, while the richer half make 48 percent.

The extent of this commonality of interests is likely to be overlooked if you’re not careful: in Seattle, just 2.5 percent of commuters go by bike, though that still places us mid-pack in the list of the top ten largest U.S. cities.

But there’s a lot of distance between commuting and riding solely recreationally. Seattle’s Cascade Bicycle Club has over 13,000 members, and their annual Seattle-to-Portland ride has sold out months early, with 10,000 participants. In a city like Seattle, where “practically everyone” has a bike hanging in a garage, I’d be more interested in knowing how often people hit the road with a bicycle for any reason, not just commuting. (Nationally, commuting made up just 11 percent of bike trips in 2009.)

Now more than ever, as Stiglitz argues, we could stand to build bridges that are not purely rhetorical. Seattle City Council’s Sally Bagshaw has returned from a trip to Portland with visions of bike boulevards. Typically, the response to something like this is as if bicyclists had literally stolen a street and made off  with it, though people living on bike boulevards come to appreciate having a safe, quiet street that cars move slowly along.

But again, consider what the real population of cyclists might be, especially in the context of a residential street: kids biking to and from school or other activities, people visiting friends down the street, people just out for exercise, or running an errand near home. Cycling infrastructure is often seen as serving a minority, a niche group. But bike boulevards in Seattle could be serving a cycling population that rivals that of drivers–thanks to the obsession with measuring bike commuting, it’s actually hard to tell. What we do know is that bike infrastructure serves all income classes wonderfully equally.