Went out to the KEXP 50th birthday party at Seattle Center yesterday and enjoyed it, lots of good music and a chill crowd on a hot (for Seattle) day. But I asked myself why I don’t do more of that sort of thing… 1/
Well, for a start, getting there is a collection of poor options. I could ride a bike if I wanted to spend the better part of 8-10 miles on either a state highway masquerading as a local road or various other local streets, all in bicycle gutters. 2/
I could take public transport (the option I chose) which took about an hour each way to go 7 miles.
Or I could drive 8 miles and pay to park and deal with all the attendant hassles of that. 3/
Seattle Center has been referred to as Seattle’s living room or collective gathering space. But why is getting to it such an afterthought? Link Light Rail has plans to connect to it but the flow of city life Link is built for has bypassed the so-called Center. 4/
And credit where it’s due: there were a *lot* of bikes at the event…100s of them. But where did they come from? Ballard, Capitol Hill, SLU…I doubt many came from N of the Ship Canal where a lot of the annexed car-dependent suburbs are. 5/
But a quick look at Search Results for “ghost bike” – Seattle Bike Blog
will show you a couple of good reasons why it’s not safe to ride a bike in Seattle, no matter your age or experience level. I don’t want to be a ghost bike by the side of the road. 6/
So it’s a mix of factors…Seattle’s inability to integrate the annexed suburbs into any transportation network because it tore out that network before the annexation. Seattle like many cities had streetcar suburbs and a viable intercity rail line from Everett to Tacoma…7/
And its inability to imagine what NotJustBikes refers to as “viable alternatives to driving.” I took someone to the airport on a Thursday at 5:30 AM: by the time I returned at 6, traffic was crawling to stopped in places. Link would have taken over an hour, if it was running 9/
How many of those people could be served by transit if development and transit were designed together? If you have the same daily patterns of rush hour to all day stop and go traffic, you have proven the need for alternatives. Why aren’t they available? 10/
If you have one or more “traffic reporters” calling out the usual slowdowns and backups every day, what are you doing? And the irony of Seattle as some nature-loving stronghold while local salmon stocks are being wiped out by tire dust running into streams…11/
…and the livid weeping scar that is I-5 emitting clouds of greenhouse gases 7 days a week isn’t lost on me. Why would anyone *want* to ride a bike alongside that? We shit the bed on a daily basis then just remake it and do it all again tomorrow. A better world is possible. 12/F
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