Be glad we even have bicycle racks.

I felt the meeting was run as well as can be expected, considering the massive turn-out. The 10-minute Q&A they DID have was a window into how public Q&As DO NOT WORK. Every daffy wanna-be councilmember chimes in with banal inanities and nothing gets accomplished.

I'm not stoked that the design group is from Maryland, but they seemed to have a pretty good grasp of what our city's biking problems and choke points are. Also, they were EXTREMELY accessible after the PowerPoint presentation. There was plenty of time to bounce things off of them individually.

Also, I liked the maps and aerial photos. Assuming they're actually interpreted correctly by Toole Design Group, I think they were a fairly efficient way for bikers to express their thoughts and concerns.

The vagueness of when the next meeting will be held is a little annoying. But I hope they were unable to pinpoint time and place because they were not sure how long it would take to interpret and process all the input from this meeting.

And similarly well-controlled and with very little option for Q&A and real dialogue with attendees.

The meeting was well run. The giant posters were a great way to solicit input from 450 people without being there all night. The Q&A session was quickly devolving into statements like, "what we need is more respect from the cars!". Wow, what a valuable contribution that is.

If you needed more information, or wanted to discuss the finer points of the plan, there were many officials there, representing various parties, who seemed happy to lend an ear.

Why isn't there more reporting about the details of what was proposed? Is the plan a good one? Are they on the right track? Will they solve the problems of discontinuity that plague the current system? Is the plan appropriately scaled for the predicted financing? Will it scale down gracefully if the financing doesn't come through as a whole?

Why didn't the intern get answers to these questions?

Also I hope someone mentioned driving a hybrid car in addition to biking. I got a bike rack on my hybrid car so it's like having my own park and ride!

We've got to beat Portland and make Seattle the number one world class bicycle city. Seattle is becomming world class in so many other ways, if we all work together, we can make Seattle number one. We deserve to beat out Portland.

If not, I am skeptical. I have emailed the proper city official and have received no response as of yet.

30 years ago the city paid for a similar plan and all that was created was the BG Trail and the bike lane on Ravenna. These are achievements, but in comparison to the progress made by Portland after their original bike master plan (1970), they actually managed to make impressive gains--Portland has 150+ miles of bike trails and paths while we in Seattle have fewer than 50 miles. Visiting Portland with bicycle will easily illustrate the huge gap between the two cities in terms of safety and general pleasantness of riding. Being flat doesn't hurt either.

Now, being that the next meeting isn't until December at the soonest, and seeming as though the meeting was largely a one-way top-down matter, besides the data gathering, I would guess the next meeting would be no different. If we as citizens find ourselves concerned about the quality of outcome of this plan I believe it might be wise to organize and be active outside of the structure proposed by the city and Toole.

As far as I know the people who will decide how much money to put towards to plan implementation would be the City Council and the Mayor. These are the people who will need to be pressured to create the best possible outcome of the master plan.

F for incomplete work, please try again in January (or whenever they hold that next meeting).

I'm biased because I know for a fact the intern's a stand-up girl ... but read the damned post again. I'm hosting the ENTIRE RECORDING.

You missed the meeting, but you care about the issue and want to know exactly what was addressed?

Right-click, Save-As. Then open the file in your media player.

Don't slam the intern for using her unpaid energy to practice analysis instead of redundancy.

P.S. I'll have the recordings up on Archive.org soon.

Thanks for posting the recording, but assuming you were at the meeting, you must realize that a recording of the Toole PowerPoint presentation is not a very good indicator of what actually transpired there.

The Intern fails to provide much context. She completely leaves out the fact that there were plenty of opportunities to ask questions and give input on a one-to-one basis.

Also, she doesn't note that complete strangers were gathered around maps and photos discussing trouble spots for riding and how they might be improved.

She does a fine job of adhering to The Stranger School of Cynical Civics, but even Dan Savage finds a silver lining in a dark cloud of pot smoke from time to time.

DOUG.

I tried to get a copy of the PowerPoint presentation to post online as well, but I got bored waiting for some bike instructor to finish his rant to the organizers about how putting up bike lane signs is the same as making segregated white and "colored" drinking fountains.

What the hell's up with that? A guy making those kind of civil rights statements when it was very, very clear by my head count (less than a dozen non-whites in the building) that this seems to be a very, very white privileged class issue. What really pissed me off was the guy who chimed in about buses, implying that it was the bus driver's job to look out for the cyclist, not the other way around. Big unwieldy multi-passenger vehicles carrying the disabled, folks with groceries, folks who can't afford bikes. And somehow, the single-passenger, highly maneuverable bicyclist has the right of way? What kind of whiney crap is that?

But listen, I'm not a bicyclist, nor a driver. I'm a pedestrian with a bus pass. So I probably didn't even have a right to be there, let alone decide what was or was not important.

However, if I were blogging about it, I would've written something about Jim Street's gladhanding and his ridiculous bike-porn handbills. Look at him on his little bike! It's not just the pandering that's interesting, but that I didn't notice any of the other candidates there.

So, yeah, The Stranger wasn't the only one to see the meeting as low-priority.

But I think you make a lot of good points... but here's the main thing:

"She does a fine job of adhering to The Stranger School of Cynical Civics"

She's an intern on her first blog post. So there you go... School ... adhering.... where'd she fail?

It's not as if everyone who's complaining went out and blogged about it themselves.
I visited bitchy Big Adventures Steve's blog and only saw pictures of his kid, albeit a very, very adorable kid. But Kudos to McGrath for posting about it on his own blog.

Bad copout.

Seriously, it doesn't wash.

Where, in case you missed the meeting, you can hear Tamara Stephas, 38, say "I think they're addressing some of the right things."

Yes, unlike interns, P-I reporters get paid for capturing illuminative quotes like that. Make sure you sign in and post something along the lines of, "A for Regurgitation! Keep on synopsin', m'man!"

Thankfully the Stranger employs writers, not reporters. Check the mastheads.