- Cascade Bicycle Club
- If the Cascade Bicycle Club had included 2011 in this chart, the yellow line would be headed back upward.
I posted this Cascade Bicycle Club chart last week, and while it does show allocations for cycling-related improvements falling in Seattle from 2007 through 2010, it leaves something out.
What should also be in this chart, if its purpose is to provide the latest information: allocations for cycling-related improvements last year, in 2011.
Seattle Department of Transportation Spokesman Rick Sheridan now tells me that city funding for cycling-related improvements came in at over $9 million in 2011—which means that if the Cascade Bicycle Club's graph included last year, that yellow line would be heading back upward.
"Funny that Cascade didn’t bother to put the 2011 bike spending amount in their report," Sheridan says.
Craig Benjamin, director of government affairs for Cascade Bicycle Club, tells me that they left 2011 off the chart because they were having difficulty doing an "apples-to-apples" comparison for that year. He does not dispute the city's 2011 funding number, but he points out that even if bike-related spending did begin to rise again in 2011, it's still lower, as a percentage of the city's overall transportation budget, than it was in 2007.
In addition, according to Benjamin, while four percent of trips in the city are currently taken on bike, that trip-share is not reflected in the levels of funding for bike-friendly infrastructure. The bike funding level for 2011, according to Sheridan, was 3 percent of the overall transportation budget. (In 2007 it was 3.6 percent.)
