Thinking of a Master Plan
this ain't nuthin but sweat inside my hand
so i dig into my pockets
all my money's spent
so i dig deeper
still coming up with lint...

fortunately, Rakim's master plan payed off. will the City's plan work? maybe Coldcut can remix it into a classic.

Meanwhile, Greg and the city council seem to be hell-bent on sinking all the transportation money for the next 30 years into an underwater tunnel.

You can have all the plans in the world, but if you run them like the Katrina recovery and never actually put money into them but choose to put them in Iraq, nothing will happen.

A master plan is a farce. A real city would provide real dollars.

I think we need an underground bike tunnel that operates as a massive pneumatic tube.

This meeting, like all the other city bicycle commuter meetings, sounds like a massive waste of time.

My prediction:
30-45 min of various city flacks telling the crowd how great Seattle is for cyclists.

15-30 min on the fantastic transit programs, including the tunnel boondoggle, and the streetcar to nowhere.

10 - 15 minutes of "listening time", with the comments going into the circular file.

It doesn't help that the local "bicycle advocacy" groups seem to put most of their actual effort into cutesy things like RSVP, STP and movie nights rather than better commuter routes.

Y'all:

Not to pile on or anything, but Chicago--rated the best big city in the country for cyclists--has plans a plenty, and if the fucking Mayor gets behind it, as Mayor-for-Life-or-till-Indicted Richard M. Daley does in Chi, it can be done.

One thing Seattle might lack: a really highly organized, centrist (ie, not Critical Mass) bicycle advocacy group that knows how to work the system, make compromises, and get things done (like the annual Bike the Drive, where ALL of Lake Shore Drive is shut down for cars and opened for cyclists). Some links:

The Chicagoland Bicycle Federation:

http://www.biketraffic.org/

And the master plan for 2015:

http://www.bike2015plan.org/

My favorite thing CBF has accomplished: they got all Bally health clubs to agree to allow cyclists to use their locker room/showers free of charge--just showing your bick lock key. This eliminates the old "I can't cycle to work, I'll be all sweaty" excuse.

I'll be at the meeting. It is slated for three hours, so hopefully there will be time for public input. But I agree -- bike issues need to be fast-tracked.

For example, 45th Ave from Stone to UW is being repaved over the next year. A perfect opportunity to make this street more bike-friendly (especially over I-5) is completely overlooked in the planning.

I doubt Greg Nickels has ridden a bike in his adult life, and doubt he gives a shit about those of us who do.

@ Bill - EXCELLENT point.

@ Bill.

My sister lives in Chicago, and I was so envious of the fantastic cycling system, with many designated bicycle lanes. It does help that the city is flatter than a pool table...

@ Doug.
Without a doubt, the failure of the city to include any thought for bicyclist on roadway projects is astonishing. I'll pile on the utter lack of consideration for cyclist commmuters during the repaving of both Eastlake and Westlake, the University and Freemont Bridges, and the planned SLU streetcar route.

Some of the needs are so obvious (like not having the bicycle lane on the U Bridge dissapear into a merging lane with no markings) I don't buy the "we need some comments from the public. It's just a reflection of a total lack of priority.

I wondered aloud during the critical mass uproar why, if cyclists rights are so important, there aren't any of the kinds of (legitimate) organizations Bill mentioned in Seattle that are working to advocate for cyclists rights.

if everyone claims (rightly so, I'd guess) that the city is only going to serve lip service, who is to keep the pressure on the city to actually follow through?

seems to me that people love to complain about how "unfriendly" seattle is to bikes, but nobody seems to really care enough to actually organize and do something about it, so... if its not important enough to get organized then why would the city be serious about addressing the issue through comprehensive planning?

I'm forever amazed at Seattle's bottomless ability to whine.

What, exactly, is your point Eli? The mayor and the city are actually responding to your observations, but they're not doing it as quick as you'd like? Or are you annoyed that the city is doing something thoughtful, but not revolutionary? I don't get it.

Anyway, I'm a bike rider, and have commuted pretty much exclusively by bike for the 12 years that I've lived in this city. Seattle is long overdue for a bike master plan. Now that so much construction is going on throughout the city, the city is finally gaining ground in their struggle to increase urban density, and we are on the verge of re-envisioning one of the city's major roadways, it seems like a very opportune moment to create such a plan. I'll be there, with my helmet on.

Golob, Bill and the rest of you have fine ideas that may seem blindingly obvious to bikeriders, but have escaped the notice of city planners. That's why they're holding a meeting for public comments, duh! I'd suggest that you all go and offer your suggestions, but the planners might actually listen to you, thus depriving you of an opportunity to whine. But don't worry. You'll find other reasons.

@Gurldoggie

Fair enough, and I probably will go to this meeting (like I've gone to a half dozen other, including city sponsored ride-alongs and neighborhood specific meetings.)

I'd claim, however, that Seattle is constituatively unwilling to take questions about the transportation infrastructure seriously.

Even when citizens have gotten very serious and organized, things simply do not happen. Look at how the PWC has been ignored. Let's not even re-hash the fiasco (from *both* sides) of the monorail.

Call it whining, I call it a realistic evaluation of the outcome here. The experiment has already been done. Portland has both a functional rail system AND a comparatively amazing bicyling network. Quite frankly, I'm tired of tilting after windmills here.

Gurldoggie,
These guys are complaining because Seattle has a history of making plans and then putting them on the shelf. There is rarely a mechanism to follow through -- instead, the conclusion of the plan will always say "the critical next step is to identify an implementation strategy...."

Anyone remember Jan Gehl's talk last year, part of the Urban Sustainability lecture series? He described how he worked steadily and steathily for 20 years to convert driving lanes to bike lanes and parking lots to public plazas in Copenhagen, one by one. Each time the traffic engineers and driving public were against it, but he did it anyway. And the net result? Now 1/3 of their trips happen by bike or by foot, 1/3 by transit, and 1/3 by car.

So a plan is a good start, but until we have a leader who is focused on making it reality, we got nothin.

Golob:
I think you're confusing Cascade Bicycle Club's recreational and fundraising events with our political activities. Here's our advocacy home page.

Yeah, we all know we have a long way to go before Seattle has an integrated network of bikeways.

If you want to help make it happen, send me an email at patrick.mcgrath -at- cascadebicycleclub.org.

Reading...

So a plan is a good start, but until we have a leader who is focused on making it reality, we got nothin.

thats what I'm talking about. So the mayor isn't leading the way you want? Then YOU be the leader. If there is a leadership vaccuum, instead of sitting around saying how there is no strong leadership, fill that void yourself. I think the post right below yours (by patrick mcgrath) could very well point to people who are already working to fill that void.

if you really care about it, why not volunteer to work for them? Or start your own group and focus solely on advocacy?

I'm not saying its easy and I'm not saying that just organizing is all you need to do, but right now there's a lot more talk than action and that certainly won't work, either.

Seattle has about as much chance of becoming "the most bike friendly city in America" as it does of becoming the capital of the European Union. Hills. Remember them? I think Seattle is probably in the bottom ten percent, and is likely to stay there. I'd rather ride a bike in LA. Bicycle commuting is never going to amount to more than a fraction of 1%, period.

But do continue to bring up Marxism at every opportunity. It's a huge help; guaranteed to get everyone on your side.

Fnarf... between every one of those hills is a valley.

"It turns out, against all of our American intuition, and also against our penchant for order and clean division, that this kind of anarchic arrangement is actually safer."

Ummm...not sure about that one. From this article:
http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501040809-674826,00.html

"With just 16% of the world's cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles, Asia accounts for more than half of the roughly 1.2 million traffic fatalities that the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates occur globally every year. More than 600,000 Asians are killed and another 9.4 million are severely injured in traffic accidents annually."

What FNARF said. I'd add that Seattle also has over 150 days w/measurable rain in an average year, too.

Getting people to ride bikes is an admirable goal, but one that needs to be measured against the cost of doing so and the likelihood of achieving mode shift.

@ Matthew:

Interesting article. But see also this NY Times article from 2005, this Salon article from 2004, and this from a P-I reader blog.

From the Salon article:

It's rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and fatality free.

In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. "There are no rules," as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads.

But here's the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I didn't see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets. On the contrary, the urban arterials are a communal mix of automobiles, cyclists, pedestrians, and small businesses such as inner-tube repairmen that set up shop directly in the right-of-way.

As the mother of two young children and an alternative-transportation advocate, I've spent the past decade supporting the installation of ever more traffic controls: crosswalks, traffic signals, speed bumps, and speed limit signs in school zones. But I'd only been in Suzhou a few days before I started thinking that maybe there's a method to the city's traffic madness -- a logic that has nothing to do with the system of prohibition and segregation that governs transportation policy in the United States.

As it turns out, I'm far from the first person to think along these lines. In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It's called "second generation" traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and -- of all subjects -- evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.

Methinks more showers and more bike racks on more bus service would do a lot more to help than any "master plan".

But, hey, I walk to work most days. My boss bikes to work.

Mr. X... Seattle is the tropics compared to Chicago. That "measurable rain" you speak of is typically a drizzle. Riding in a drizzle is only a problem vis-a-vis safety (lanes shared with cars, poor visibility, metal gratings) which is the real problem. Not the weather.

Also, check out this article: Why Canadians Cycle More Than Americans. Even in the Yukon Territory, Canada's harshest province, they cycle at more than three times the rate of Washingtonians. Why? "Most of these factors result from differences between Canada
and the United States in their transport and land-use policies, and not from intrinsic differences in history, culture or resource availability."

Doug,

Be that as it may, Seattle is not Chicago, and the perception that it's gonna rain will keep a sizable number of people off of their bikes.

And, as someone noted before, if you add in the fact that Seattle has numerous hills and Chicago is flat, the two situations just aren't comparable.

You can double the number of people who bike to work in Seattle, and it's still a miniscule percentage of overall work trips.

Eli,

I get, and in many ways agree with your point. But the Salon piece and the reader blog (and maybe the NYT piece, though I didn't get to that one) are first-person accounts. The quote from the article I mentioned is cold, hard fact. One person's impression based on their own observation, while valid, has to give way to the facts contained in data.

There is almost certainly more poetry to the way traffic moves within the chaos of Asia's roadways, but the yardstick being used here is overall safety, not elegance.

The biggest problem I foresee with ever using the asian model of traffic integration here is that many Americans really aren't used to considering the existence of other people. Selfishness is built into our capitalist culture. Just think about the type of people who currently make up the executive branch of the federal government (and the fact that they were able to get there) and their opposition to anything done for a collective good, as described well in a NYT column by Thomas Frank. Or more directly related, the reaction of most drivers to anything that delays them by even a matter of seconds so that someone else may use the road, be it a Metro bus, someone crossing too slowly, construction equipment, or a bicycle that gets into the left lane to turn left. Or the attitude of anyone who goes into the business world and likes it. People will obey lights and signs (most of the time), but I think it would be a long time coming if Americans ever had to consciously allow others space on the road without rigid rules backed by potential punishments.

And, How To Deal With Hills (or, One of the Few Ways That Being an Animal is Better Than Being a Robot): Just start trying to climb them. Start with a shallow hill, on the lowest gear, and go until you can't anymore, then walk or take a different route or get on a bus. It may hurt your pride to huff up a bunny slope slowly, but eat it. You can either run away from it or overcome it. Do this repeatedly, allowing time between repetitions for your muscles to heal, and eat enough protein. After a few weeks or a few months, the hill really won't be a big deal anymore. And you'll be hawtt.

Arguing policy from anecdotes is always a bad idea. I don't care how many accidents the Salon writer saw; the statistics don't lie. And it is not possible to completely remake the city and its infrastructure in a couple of years to eliminate the fundamental roadblocks to bicycle-friendliness.

Drive around the city sometime (heh) and see: a HUGE percentage of the intersections here are irregular, without right angles and perfect left-turn lanes. These intersections are a nightmare on a bike; I know, I've ridden them. You are constantly having to merge into 40 MPH traffic, cross lanes, stop between moving traffic lanes, cruise past sightline-blocking obstacles, and so on. There are large parts of the city that are almost impossible to navigate in a CAR, let alone a bike.

Seattle is MUCH HARDER to ride a bike in than most American cities, and ALL of the flat grid cities.

As for those "valleys", that is precisely the kind of never-stray-ten-blocks-from-apartment tunnel vision that marks most transit discussion on the Slog. Get real. Look around. See what's really happening. See that 1/100th of one percent of commuter trips is by bicycle.

And if Copenhagen is your model, by all means, move there. I know I would, if it was feasible; it's a lovely city. Flat as a board.

@ NOINK makes some really great points; the argument that Seattle isn't friendly to bikers from a climate stand point doesn't really hold water with me. For one, growing up in a cold-weather climate, I have to say that suggesting that seattle winters are too "harsh" for bicycling is not valid to me. McGrath and DOUG addressed this nicely.

The other argument, that because cities like Chicago are flat that means that its easier to bike there would persuade me if it wasn't for the fact that a *large* majority of the busses I see lumbering up all of these steep seattle hills have bike racks on them.

riding the bus through downtown and up madison on a regular basis, its very common to see bicyclists (fit ones, in spandex!) throwing their fancy road bikes onto the front rack. they let the bus do the hard work for four blocks and then they continue on.

so even if you don't want to tackle the hills like NOINK suggests (even though you *would* get in better shape that way), there are other options that make the hills negotiable.

Seattle is a very bike friendly place. I don't think people often take the time to acknowledge this point. Could it be better? Sure. But as far as many American cities go, its not all that bad, either.

The real challenge for seattle, like with all its transportation issues, is really geographical. Seattle is really crampt city. There are hills and water all around that leave little space to fit highways, surface streets (cars, busses, trucks) and bikes. Yet despite this, I think a more fitting example of bike path integration is Amsterdam. They are in a unique geographic location that, like seattle, forces all different modes of transporation to share close quarters.

Really the key is planning, which is why this meeting, however cynical people may think it is, is a step in the right direction.

I for one, would rather see an intentional system of bike paths like in Amsterdam than a surface-street free for all.

Yikes, what a shite-storm.

@ various and sundry:

Chicago is not quite flat as a board, but it's pretty damn flat. Its grid system, however, includes as many badly-designed, no-left-turn shitty intersections as Seattle seems to.

How do Chicago riders handle that? I for one just pull up on the right, cross the street I want to go left on, and then wait for the light to change. Yeah, it's my right to be in the left-turn lane, but why bother? Sometimes giving in to the dominance of cars is OK, as it's safer and not much slower than waiting for an opening to merge across fast lanes to get to the left and then wait for the oncoming traffic to have a gap and turn while your cross street has the green anyway.

AS for the hills: To get personal: on this trip, I rode a bicycle in Seattle for the first time (Thanks for the loaner, Tim). My brother took me around your "bike paths" from Capitol Hill to the Gasworks Park to the Bridge of Death to some French restaurant with a car wreck out front, an apologetic chef and one goddess-like waitress. Then we rode up fucking Capitol Hill, which I expected to kill me, flatlander that I am. Even with over 2,100 miles on my bike and my knees this season, i didn't think I was capable of riding Seattle's hills.

But it didn't kill me. Or even wound me much. One spot where the brother walked his bike, I just downshifted, stood up, and pedalled up the fucking thing. It's totally do-able.

As for weather: rain in Seattle. Snow in Chicago. yet Chicago has a culture of all-year-round cyclists, who get the benefit of rollerblader-free bike paths for about five months a year. I'm too much of a pussy to ride in winter--and I have reliable mass transit to get me to work-- but lotsa folks do in Chicago. Check out

http://www.bikewinter.org/main.php

so riding in the rain here is really about deciding to put up with some wetness and finding a route that's safe, and changing into dry clothes once you get to the office.

As for the Never Leave Your Bubble complaint, one aspect of good urbanism is deciding to live close to where you work. So the Hills v. Valleys argument really is more distraction.

But at the end of the day, the decision to cycle in the city is like so many other aspects of urban life. Cities are a paradox: defined at once by the vast crowds that inhabit them, and the individual decisions each city dweller makes. Citiy government should do all it can to make the decision to cycle easy and straightforward, but at the end of the cliched day, it's the individual rider who chooses fitness, the environment, and urbanity over fatness, convenience and isolation in a steel cocoon.

Ride.

Bill

Bill,

That's all well and good, but it STILL has little or nothing to do with how real world people make real world choices (in this case, regarding how they get to work).

You can tell people to eat their spinach all you want, but at the end of the day most of them won't.

Oh, yeah: bus racks. Perfect if you're going to the Eastside, where they make sense -- but how many times will you watch the already-full rack go past you before you give up? -- OR if you really don't care at all how long it takes you to get there.

Real world, people. Bill: you are, in fact, demanding that some three million people completely alter the way they operate their daily lives -- even though, if they did that in the way you desire, life would be impossible.

Mr. X:

Call me an optimist, but I think people can be persuaded to do the right thing, by a combination of solid arguments well-made, the law, and peer pressure.

Another urban example: when I was growing up in a densely populated Chicago neighborhood, no one--and I mean NO ONE--picked up their dog's shit after walking the dog. Playing on front lawns meant dodging piles of dog shit, or incorporating them into the game (playing Army, we often made dog shit = land mines. Step on it, you're dead).

Today, dog-owners who don't carry little plastic bags to clean up after their animals are subject to verbal abuse from passersby. Everyone cleans up after their dogs, due to arguments about public health (dog shit feeds rats and other vermin and is fucking disgusting), laws (making it mandatory to pick up after your dog) and peer pressure (if you don't pick up after your dog, your neighbors think you're an asshole).

All I'm saying: the same thing could happen to some degree with cycling. As gas prices climb, public transport goes underfunded, and people realize the benefits of cycling, more may choose to ride to work. Doesn't have to be 100 percent, just more than now.

And remember when bars had spittoons? Or ashtrays? Things change.

Bill

hey fnarf:

I'm not demanding that three million people completely alter the way they conduct their daily lives. C'mon. I'm just arguing that the city could make life more liveable for everyone in it--less congested, less polluted, quicker--if government made some decisions that would encourage some thousands or tens of thousands of people to ride bikes instead of driving. How that completely alters their daily lives, I don't exactly see--and even people who aren't riding their bikes will benefit from less crowded roads and cleaner air.

The downside? I dunno.

And do you even have three million people here?

Fnarf: According to SDOT, somewhere between 4000 and 8000 people bike to work in Seattle, depending on the day. I beleive about 250,000 people work in Seattle (though I don't have a source for that), so about 2-4% of Seattleites bike to work today.*

Yeah, it's not a lot, but it's a heckuva lot more than 1 in 10,000. And here's the thing: every one of those bikers is crazy.

Ask people why they don't ride and most will tell you riding is too scary. And they'd be right -- traffic is fast, and bike lanes are narrow.

But here's the thing about the 2-4%: It's only a little less than the commute share Amsterdam had in the 1950's before they decided to rework their city to make bikes the preferred method of getting around.

What they learned: the key is not bike paths and it's not leveling hills. It's just making it easy and safe for any schlub to get anywhere without needing spandex or taking their life in their hands.

The prescription is simple and cheap: bike lanes on old streetcar routes (they're level!), bumpy roads to slow down traffic and bike parking everywhere.

What is going to make people change their minds about biking?

I will tell you that when I lived and worked in seattle I never considered biking a serious commuting option. Part of this was due to all the things mentioned above - hills, rain, traffic. Part of this was because of horrible experiences trying to bike a short way to UW across the montlake bridge - I thought I would be killed!

But now I work in Kenmore and a friend recently bought a bike. Being tempted by the Burke Gilman trail I did a little research. Turns out there is a safe alternate route around the 520 offramp at the Montlake bridge.

I have now started commuting from capitol hill to kenmore and I have never been happier with my commute! The hills are nothing once you start biking. But it took having a great bike trail and it took learning about a safe way to that trail.

The fact that seattle doesn't do a better job of creating a network of bike routes through neighborhoods and does a poor job promoting bike commuting results in many fewer people biking. Some better signs would be an immediate help. Then bike lanes, more dedicated trails must follow.

"Depending on the day". That's a far cry from 2-4% of the vehicle trips on any GIVEN day. There's no frigging way it's 2-4% downtown, car trips today. You're also leaving out all the people -- a large majority -- who DON'T work downtown, a majority that increases every day.

Amsterdam is also flat as a board. And was laid out long before the automobile, making it feasible to get from A to B, since both A and B are historically accessible.

Seattle isn't. Again: all of these ideas are based on the assumption that the tiny slice of Seattle that you operate in is representative. But it isn't. You want basically the entire population of the metro area to move, and demolish their houses, and build condos there instead, and reconfigure the entire street grid, and take all the cars off the congested streets so a handful of bikes can ride down them instead.

This is not going to happen.

When you think about "solving the bike problem", the picture that should be coming into your mind is not Dexter Avenue; it's Northgate Way, or Albro Place, or 50th Ave N.

The problem with planning this way is that it's backwards: you need to clog the streets with bikes, so that they command the traffic flow themselves; and form a significant bloc of interested parties; and can MAKE themselves part of the projected solution. If you don't have the pressure from the riders, the thing you want to happen is never going to happen. And in Seattle, the pressure is never going to come.

Bill: you're awesome! I really like the thoughtful replies you've given throughout your posts today.

fnarf, dude, I'm not saying that a quarter of a million people need to ride bikes. but I think you're example of Northgate and its ilk is a very good one. While Amsterdam is indeed flat, its also very very limited in space due to all of the canals. Canals mean lots of bridges, bridges are bottle necks when you look at street cars, automobiles, and bikes. The topography of seattle creates a lot of bottle necks as well. However the particular aspects of the bike paths in Amsterdam that I'm thinking about are the ones that are independent or parallel to traffic in places, integrated with traffic in others. These mechanisms allow for all kinds of traffic to move through bottlenecks efficiently

For example, when space allows, a common pattern I noticed there would be thus: sidewalk, curb, street (automotive traffic), curb, one-way path for bike, curb, street car, curb, one-way path for bike, curb, street (automotive traffic), curb, sidewalk.

Sidenote: these things are murder to cross if you've been sitting in a coffee shop all day. Beware!
But I digress. Bicycles had their own traffic control both in the form of signs, crosswalks where bikes had to yield, and traffic lights timed to match automotive traffic. For big, broad streets, busy streets (like the ones you mentioned... or Aurora even), you could create bicycle only lanes that had their own traffic control that would keep bicycles and traffice safely segregated while using the available space more effectively.

Its not about forcing people to rip up homes and have some great social upheval, but it could be done if there were deliberate thought put into making it happen...

Just came back from the Master Plan meeting. Lots of good ideas. Some bad ones too. Bikers are cool. Fnarf's a fool!

FNARF is right - and wishful thinking is not a tranportation strategy. There are in fact 3 million people in the region (Seattle has about 570k residents, King County comprises 1.5 million or so, and rest are largely in Pierce and Snohomish Counties).

There are also way more than 250k jobs in Seattle (our daytime population goes up by about 200k or so, but the total number of jobs and work trips is considerably higher). This means that those 2000-4000 bikers/day cited previously are more like 1-2% of in-city work trips. Granted, in places like the U-District, Downtown, and Broadway, I have no doubt that this figure is higher - just not enough to be regionally significant.

For just one example, most people who commute to the UW from places like Lake Forest Park and Bothell - where the current trail system at least makes it feasible to do so on a grade-separated bike route - will not do so by bicycle - period.

I'm all for promoting bike commuting, but the advocates here who think that biking is going to replace a significant portion of the vehicle trips within Seattle - let alone through King County, let alone the larger region where people now commute to work - are just kidding themselves.

You'd get a lot more people out of their cars putting dedicated bus lanes down Aurora Avenue than you would with a bike-only lane (and transit's share of work trips is failing to grow, too, but that's a topic for another post).

The problem with bike lanes is (a) the lane is usually taken away from transit, not cars, and (b) it encourages cars to see bikes as something separate rather than vehicles in their own right. As a former cyclist, I can tell you that NOTHING makes city riding harder than fighting with cars over your right to the road. And in Seattle, where the average traffic on the arterials where bikes want to ride is 40 MPH, that's a bad mix.

Being a road warrior is also not a viable strategy for moving old people or kids around. Yes, I KNOW you know an old guy who bikes to work, and I KNOW there are kids in your neighborhood who ride around, but again: anecdotes do not a policy make.

A hundred cyclists at a meeting do not a policy make, either. In fact, most of Seattle government these days is about finding ways to appease micro-groups of disgruntled citizens who do not represent even a significant minority, let alone a majority.

Could Seattle do better? Yes, of course. But if in the process of doing so they ignore the 90% of the region that's outside of downtown, they'll be accomplishing very, very little. Maybe worth doing, but don't expect big impacts.

Part of the problem of this area is our short attention span. It seems like every two weeks the mayor or the council or a previously unknown citizen group announces some grand new idea that's supposed to solve a hundred problems at once -- while last month's grand idea is totally forgotten. I'm sure the mayor and the council and the citizen groups think they're governing and participating, but they are not.

Transit: remember transit? Work on transit. Focus on transit. Plan transit. Talk about transit, announce transit. Remember when the monorail went down and there was all this high-minded chatter about not forgetting and not wasting the opportunity and all that jazz?

There were at least 500 people at last night's meeting, Fool!