Comments on The Hippies Have Won!

Still going to be a lot of dead cyclists from the vast numbers of trucks and cars that turn from heading West on 40th onto Stone heading South and immeadiately turn right (across the cyclists) to get onto Aurora heading South (or go thru the intersection to head North).

As well as all the cars and trucks that will be turning right across the bike lane as they head North on Stone to get onto 40th.

Which you'd know if you biked there, walked there, or drove there.

Two years from now, how many stories will be in The Stranger about all the dead and severely injured cyclists as a result of this.

Stone is not a good choice.

Engines rule!

Yeah good luck with that Erica. Maybe 23rd Avenue S, but Rainier Avenue S is already a traffic nightmare. Putting a bike lane down that street is stupid. The fact that the city is considering a road diet shows exactly how far up its own ass SDOT is. There need to be *some* arterials left in the city.

Will, you're frankly wrong. I rode through that intersection last night; the sort of accident you're describing is protected by the stoplight. The markings of a cycle lane are a good improvement over the previous config.

I used to live on Stone Way. It is not a pleasant street to bike or walk on. There is a lot of traffic going pretty fast through there. Seems that in a couple years, when the development at 40 and stone finally nears completion (which may or may not house a supermarket) that whole bridge way / stone way / 40th area will need to be looked at again.

Love bikes or hate bikes, at least the markings will now be consistent up Stone from 34th to 45th. The SDOT/Suzie Burke weave was good for nobody.

I'd like to see a bike lane protest on the 4 lanes of 23rd Ave. Seems rather ridiculous when you have bike lanes already in place up on 19th.

i just ate a cheeseburger as big as my face

BTW, there will NOT be bicycle lanes on both sides of the street. There will be "bicycle facilities" on both sides of the street; namely a lane going uphill and a sharrow going downhill.

Look, @4, listen to @5. We're not saying there isn't a light, we're saying the drivers there can't always see you and you will be hit.

It's just a fact.

This is a bad location for a bike lane.

I don't know how many times I see drivers swerve without signals across the sharrows heading south, not even shoulder checking to see if there's a cyclist in their dead zone.

Which is a good name for it - dead zone.

Two years from now - you tell me the names of those who will die or be injured there.

Because it will happen. Cars ahead stop, car behind slows, driver of car behind is looking at car ahead, not checking for cyclist behind - it's simple math.

Erica C, re your final sentence, yes please! 23rd and Rainier are treated as highways, and will have increasing pedestrian uses that are incompatible with their high-speed, too-many-lanes set-up. Bike lanes would help slow traffic, making walkers safer too.

Facts:
1. Fixed-gear bicycles cause death.
2. Geared bikes spread herpes.
3. Derrick Ito is a fatty.

as I write this, I'm about 60 feet from Stone Way and wishing it would go away. The traffic is very bad around here; lots and lots of big delivery trucks and people driving too fast and not being considerate of pedestrians or bicyclists. It's a confusing neighborhood; a strange mixture of building/remodeling supply type businesses, old school office spaces housing accountants and medical offices and some emerging tech/media offices. And all this commercial property vies for space with quite a lot of new residential building on the side streets and farther north on Stone Way, closer to Wallingford. It's definitely a neighborhood in transition and frequently, all the seperate parts have a difficult time co-existing.

The old Stone Way needs to give way to the New Stone Way. All these blue collar businesses ARE necessary but they really need to relocate to an area better suited for the traffic they generate like Aurora. Building supply/DIY/home decor and remodeling stores are not well suited for a part of a city that's densifying and urbanizing. The city could do some rezoning and give some big tax breaks to some of these businesses encouraging them to move to streets that can safely handle the traffic. And these aren't walk-up businesses. They would probably prosper even more on streets better suited to handle the traffic they generate.

Add Fauntleroy in West Seattle to the list of road needing a road diet. It is a 50 mph speedway today.

And you should really look at road diets @3. They can actually work quite well at moving traffic. The 1950's design of two lanes each direction with no center turn lane causes herky jerky traffic with left turns in traffic combined with speeding and lane jockeying. Bad for cars, bad for bikes, bad for peds.

What you get with a road diet is a more consistant 35 mph traffic flow, room for safer bike lanes and a safer place for peds who fail to get across the whole street. And they are still arterials carrying just as much traffic.

Of course if you like driving 50 mph down arterials, well then, you would be shit out of luck.

Hey Will, it's actually a fact that SDOT & CBC studied the road for 8 months instead of sitting around armchair quarterbacking and decided an uphill bike lane along the whole length of Stoneway is the way to go.

Will @10: The sharrow has been in place southbound on Stone Way for over 6 months now. How many fatalities have there been? How well are we on the way to your 'lot of dead cyclists' one quarter of the way to your deadline?

I agree with DOUG. @6. I hate bike lanes; I think they're more dangerous for bicycles than regular traffic lanes are (and most bike advocacy groups agree with me). But having the lanes spread and converge like that is super-dangerous for EVERYONE, not just two-wheelers.

I wish they could do something about the 2-into-1 merge further north, just south of 50th; that's a catastrophe waiting to happen. But, since Stone up there (and Green Lake Way north of it) was built as a boulevard, the street is a freaking mile wide.

@10 - By your logic what is a GOOD location for a bike lane? Apparently it's a street where cars never make right turns. I don't see the danger you see at this intersection; it doesn't seem any more dangerous than an average street.

Fuck road diets. Talk about tyranny of the minority.

@16 - I've seen a few near misses of bikes in that time.

It's just an accident waiting to happen - and, news flash, the car or truck won't be hurt when it kills the cyclist.

It's mostly around rush hours, the rest of the time it's not a bad route.

Add Airport Way to the mix for a road diet! Bike lanes were slated until the last draft of the Master Bike Plan showed they were removed and slated for the dreaded 'further review'.

@19 So what, you planning on riding the bus the rest of your life? Cause unless you can convince a lot of other folks to either walk, bus, or bike, it's like that driving is gonna get too expensive for *you* to afford it.

Alternative transport is your friend if your a driver. It's the only thing that's stopping gridlock, keeping gas prices in check (they'd be higher with no bus riders, peds and cyclists) and staving off an astronomical prices for carbon.

The only thing you likely accomplish by hassling other modes is to assure that you're gonna be using one of them...

23rd absolutely needs a diet and more lights from the bridge to way south. If you must drive, you should expect it to be slow in the city and you should pay. We have to do everything we can to get more people using public transportation, walking and biking.
#19 tyranny of the minority? That's a pile of shit! I'm sick of my tax dollars paying for your lazy ass to drive around town at 45 mph polluting my city.

@20: Good to see that you're backing off your original alarmist prediction.

Here are a couple of facts to consider:

1. Stone Way has had accidents (bike, ped, auto) in the past.

2. Road diets tend to reduce the number of such accidents.

Based on these facts, I predict the Stone Way road diet will reduce the number of accidents (as well as yield a number of other benefits, such as increased pedestrian use).

@23 - i keep seeing this mentality and it is doomed to failure.

you don't affect change by making things painful.

you give people better options.

your strategy seems to be that you'll force people onto bikes or the bus by holding a gun to their head.

like being told by some jackass what to do somehow makes you sympathetic to their cause. right?

instead, make the other options more appealing. say it is easier and cheaper to not drive because it's easier and cheaper and not say you're going to make it harder and more expensive just to spite their face.

so positive and inclusive versus aggressive and belittling. i wonder which would get more support?

...wait. are you a clinton supporter?

@23,

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your words don't change the FACT that close to 70% of Seattle residents still drive to work, and barely 3% ride bikes. If that isn't a piddling minority being appeased at the expense of an overwhelming majority, what is?

@24 - when I first moved to Seattle in 89, I lived within 10 blocks of that location. With the exception of maybe 7 years, I've been riding, walking, and biking there for a heck of a long time.

My prediction stands.

Bicyclists will die on this section, and it won't be cars or trucks that will be hurt when that happens.

I am all for more bike lanes, god damn if road diet is not one hell of a pretentious term.

@28--why?

@23, some of us actually like to get from point A to point B in under 30 minutes. Which if you're taking a bus, is impossible to do. Like say from Capitol Hill to Ballard, or Capitol Hill to Northgate, or Capitol Hill to Bellevue, or Capitol Hill to anywhere else in the region except for Downtown, etc.

Some of us actually like to leave the city every once in awhile too.

Anyways, back to the bike lane thing, I think cutting down Stone Way to two lanes in this section won't hurt anything. Everytime I drive on it there's hardly anyone on it, although I admit I haven't driven on it during rush hour either. Ranier's way too busy though to cut down the lanes, that would be almost like cutting down aurora down to two lanes. Instant gridlock or a lot of spillover onto residential side streets.

@29, because it implies a holier then though, I know whats best you mentality. I would rather see a term that is more transit positive then anti-roads. People often drive because they have to, or because its is the most efficient option. Telling them they need to go on a diet is just likely to piss them off and make then vote against anything thats not roads.

The idea is not to make driving horrible, but transit(and biking!) better. Anything else will never be passed.

#30, I bike from Cap Hill to Ballard fairly frequently and it only takes about 20 minutes, I'm not particularly fast either. It takes about 45 by bus (cause there's not a direct bus route) and the last time I drove it took about 25 minutes.

Just sayin'.

Alls: Diets is for WUSSES. Don't puss out our roads.

Spandexx is 4 HATERS ONLY.

Bring on the Rainier Ave Road Diet! That will drive those ridiculous SE Seattle drivers CRAZY.

The only bad thing is we'll have to listen to their stupid stereos that much longer.

AWESOME! I would love to see Rainier become a safer corridor for bikers as well. I hope that happens next.

Hey Catalina!
Is the Baja Bistro still good?
(You reviewed it last spring.)

Looking for a new (to me) restaurant for Saturday lunch.
Thanks.

@25,26, & 30 - The fastest, cheapest way to make cycling and transit a better option is by making the option of driving more difficult. People don't take the trains and buses in Chicago, NY, etc because they are particularly fast, clean, or reliable but because the time it takes to drive and park in those cities, not to mention the fees for it, make transit and cycling a better alternative.

Hooray for more bike lanes! The sharrows were more dangerous than having nothing because they made both cyclists and drivers think that this was "their" space. Having no markings leads everyone to be cautious but is the cause, IMO, of all the anti-cyclist opinion out there. At least this will keep these obviously divided groups separate except for at intersections.

So money was clearly exchanged at some point between the initial decision and this current decision to move ahead with the bike plan, because it doesn't appear there was any politically loaded chain of events that produced this about-face (and no, ECB, the little bike protest and cycleactivism does not make this sort of impact). The question is: who exactly threw money at City lawmakers?

ill give up my roads soon as you nancy boys start paying taxes to keep them up