Last week, Council members Mosqueda and O’Brien staged a rally for to promote introducing electric scooters to Seattle. They even invited leading scooter-share companies Bird and Lime to sit at the committee table in Council Chambers and give a nearly uninterrupted sales pitch — with no hard questions following.
Mayor Durkan has been much more pessimistic on the idea, frequently citing the number of mayors who have told her to resist e-scooters as long as possible because of the injury rate.
Before Seattle gets into the e-scooter game, shouldn’t we know something about how safe they are? Let’s dive in and look at the stats.
Seattle politics is pretty toxic at the moment; it seems everyone is angry about something, especially when it comes to the homelessness crisis and bike lanes.
That said, there are some important conversations happening right now that we all need to be well-informed to participate in. Here are some things you should be reading.
A lot more happened this week that I didn’t get around to writing about. And on Monday the Mayor will release her proposed 2019-2020 budget. So before everything else fades into obscurity, here’s some quick takes on all the other stuff.
It’s been a frustrating couple of years for downtown bike commuters. After the city adopted the Center City Bike Network plan in 2016 with a goal of having the network implemented downtown by 2020, later that year it put the plan on hold while it worked on the “One Center City” plan. Then the One Center City plan came out last year, including a recommendation for a two-way protected bike lane along 4th Avenue to be implemented this year. But in April SDOT announced that the 4th avenue bike lane would be postponed until 2021, after the “period of maximum constraint.”
In response to outcry from the bicycle community, Council member Mike O’Brien has been negotiating with SDOT a resolution laying out a timeline for implementation of pieces of the center city bike network over the next few years. Today that resolution passed out of committee, and is headed for approval by the full Council on July 30th.
A proposed expansion of the city’s bike share pilot program passed out of committee this afternoon, even though two Council members believe it still needs work.
This afternoon the City Council heard a preliminary report on a study that SDOT did from July to December last year on the rollout of privately-operated dockless bike share programs in Seattle.
This morning, the Planning, Land Use and Zoning Committee held its sixth discussion of a bill to update the city’s code for off-street and bicycle parking, and it finally rolled up its sleeves and got to work: after passing several amendments, it voted to move the bill out of committee and on to the full Council for final approval.
Today the Seattle Office of the Hearing Examiner released its decision on the latest appeal of the city’s attempt to complete the “missing link” of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard. The examiner affirmed the validity of the Final Environmental Impact Statement, which clears the project to go forward unless it is appealed further up the line.
2016 was not a good year for implementation of the city’s Bicycle Master Plan. But SDOT learned some lessons and is working hard to catch up and learn from what went wrong. Last week they laid it all out for the City Council.
