Earlier this week, Joni Balter, at the Seattle Times, fanned the flames in a bikes vs. cars conflict based on misconceptions.  While last year she penned: “Commuting choice: an absurd criterion for selecting a mayor,” she acknowledged that: “We should be grateful they are not burning fuel, while saving space for others on the roadways.”  But on Wednesday, she wrote that cars have been “shoved aside.”

Balter also could not resist a swipe at Mayor McGinn this June when she pointed out,  “It’s pretty hard to move airplane parts around on a bicycle.”

But  Boeing bike commuters might feel that the joke is on Joni.  In May’s Group Health Commute Challenge, 57 Boeing teams of 374 riders biked 2,759 trips and logged the most miles of any company, at 69,472.  Moreover, pedestrians and bicyclists who use the Terminal 91 trail can regularly see fuselages rolling on rail cars between Everett and Renton.

What has happened to make bicyclists the bees in Balter’s bouffant?  She writes that, “Now is not the right time to ask Seattle voters to fund bicycle improvements.”  The truth is, bike projects are a small fraction of SDOT’s budget, and bicyclists care every bit as much about fixing potholes as building new lanes.  Last year’s Report Card for Bicycling  in Seattle found that regular bicyclists’ top concern in the city was the horrendous pavement condition.  While we are excited to see new facilities that make new varieties of bicycle riders comfortable, we can’t lose sight of the potholes and other basics.

Postponing pavement maintenance costs more later, because once water makes it through the top layer, it wreaks havoc below. With the Bridging the Gap levy four years ago, Seattle made progress to save the arterial pavement program, while boosting pedestrian, bicycle and transit infrastructure.  Was that the right time to pay for our roads?  Balter and the Seattle Times said no: Seattle voters should say “no” to this long and winding road tax.

Balter admits that roads are expensive but in her world, it’s never the right time to pay for them.  With declining sales and property tax revenues, and a gas tax that has yielded less and less because it has not kept up with inflation, municipalities in other parts of the country are ripping out pavement and switching back to gravel roads to save money.  This might be in store for the unfortunate citizens of Balterland.

The latest editorials by Balter and Nicole Brodeur are not just anti-bike, but fit a broader pattern.  It’s not the minority of people who bike for transportation that most worries the editorial writers at the Seattle Times – it’s the majority of Seattleites who voted for light rail, paving our streets, and the other projects that would be wonderful to build if only they didn’t cost money.  The Times threw their weight behind Tim Eyman’s initiative I-960 to require a 2/3 majority to raise taxes.  This initiative blew a hole in the state’s transportation budget, which in part led to Bridging the Gap, which led us to where we are today.  If the Times can be counted on to complain about the very problems to which their editorials have contributed, I submit that we should expect more from Seattle’s only remaining print daily.

On the other hand, elected officials are left with the current fiscal mess, and looking for solutions to clean it up while keeping their commitments to better streets.  Given the current spate of anti-bike rhetoric, it’s heartening to read these words from Councilmember Sally Bagshaw:

“What troubles me is the divide that we might be creating. This is quickly becoming another ‘us versus them’ scenario, pitting bikes against autos and this issue should be anything but that simple.

It’s ironic that the city is moving in a direction where we are asking people to share the roads but that discussion is becoming divisive in nature. We are hoping to build a system where cars and bikes (and pedestrians, for that matter) can coexist, but it’s as if we’ve created an environment where the various camps don’t even want to talk to one another.

Bike lanes and road diets should be opportunities to unite, not divide…What we are doing, or hope to be doing, is crafting the foundation for a safer environment for all modes.”

Streets For All Seattle, a coalition of over 60 business, community and nonprofit groups, is engaged in a positive conversation with our city council and mayor about how to raise needed revenue.  The councilmembers have seen projections for the city’s transportation department, and the numbers don’t look good.  They know that waiting to solve the problem will only cost more in the long run.  So let’s have a constructive debate and create the city we all want, rather than mocking one mode of transportation.

A car flips on NE 125th St. Photo: Dave Morris

At last week’s open house on the NE 125th St. rechannelization, I attempted to engage with one of the vocal naysayers M.J. wrote about yesterday. No matter my assurances, he kept repeating, “it just seems like a big expense to a lot of people for a benefit to a very small number of people.” In fact, the expense is small, and the benefits accrue to everyone who uses the road.

The truth is, traffic engineers have discovered that many of our roads are “overdesigned,” that is, they have a lot more vehicle capacity than necessary. This benefits no one — unless you count people who are determined to speed, despite the cost to everyone around them.

While the number of lanes is reduced in a ‘road diet,’ they are approved by traffic engineers who still maintain capacity to carry the cars they need to. A center turn lane allows people who are turning left not to back up other vehicles behind them. Engineers also can often find extra space for cars to queue at intersections in right-turn only lanes, for example. And yes, the reconfiguration often opens up ample space for bike lanes.

Road diets benefit us all, pedestrians the most. I should know — I live on a street that has been converted from four to three lanes. I am grateful that the center turn lane gives me a refuge so that I can cross one direction of traffic and then wait for cars traveling in the other direction to yield, or, more common, to ignore me and pass by. Have you ever had a driver courteously let you cross the street, only to have another driver in the adjacent lane speed by? Federal guidelines do not allow striping a crosswalk across four lanes of traffic without a traffic signal, since this gives pedestrians a false sense of security while putting them in a multiple threat environment. I bet it wouldn’t take you more than a few seconds to come up with one or more of these scary crossings near your home if you live in Seattle.

But the biggest factor in most collisions is speed. On 125th, for example, the 85th percentile speed is 39 mph in a 30 mph zone. This means that a majority of traffic is traveling at a deadly speed, and nearly 15% of vehicles are more than 10 mph over the legal limit.

If hit by a car going 30, a vulnerable road user will be injured but still has a good chance of surviving. At 40 mph, not so much. Traffic engineers are sensitive to this fact.

They also know that certain roads are appropriate for rechannelization, and others are not. The city looks at the number of vehicle trips, and knows that four-lane configurations may be necessary if more than 20,000 trips per day are made. In Seattle, about 25 arterial streets have been ‘dieted’ since the early 1970s, so rechannelization is nothing new.

Don't believe everything you read

The problem is, tired arguments against road diets are getting old. We know that they make the street safer for all users. They reduce the number of speeders, and crash rates. And they delay traffic only a little if at all — the center turn lane can actually help drivers maneuver around people turning left, keeping them from getting stuck.

From Stone Way, to Nickerson Street (finally under construction), and now NE 125th St, we hear the same concerns. Now, a group organizing to stop improvements to 125th is passing around an anonymous flyer that misinforms local residents about the rechannelization and urges them to email their letters of opposition to the SDOT Director, mayor, city traffic engineer, and strangely, six of the nine city council members (are they special for some reason?).

Consequently, the bicycle and pedestrian program needs to hear from you if you support this project at walkandbike@seattle.gov. Please take a moment to express your support for this rechannelization and other road and trail projects around the city.

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