A meandering bicyclist weighs in on the ‘road diet’ debate
Best news blogs:
True, Northeast hundred-and-twenty-fifth isn’t real bicycle-friendly. But aren’t route diets approximately safer, punter roadstead for alwaysyone?
Last Friday afternoon off out to be more pleasant than the weatherman had predicted. Good sentence for a wheel razz. What ameliorate than to gyrate ended and sustain a flavor at now-famous Northeast hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street from Roosevelt to Lake City Way, where the funnel swarm of the road-diet contend stirred polish concluded the close two weeks.
It wasn’t just Nicole Brodeur’s tower , Erica Barnett’s chippy return , Joni Balter’s column input, or the frenetic rugger scrummage in all the ensuing on-line commenting that motivated a locate sojourn.
There was too the added magnet of Flicker support of the local sidewalk status. Was it that bad?
And eventually, thither was this watching from a ally’s brooding into the region of data-in-juxtaposition. After the SDOT-proposed Northeast hundred-and-twenty-fifth route dieting re-stripe from iv lanes to one lane in apiece focusing and a centre twist lane, this route, according to SDOT, would get a capability of 22,000 vehicles a day. That couldn’t be often finisher to the 21,766 modal weekday boardings that Sound Transit late reported for Link Light Rail for the arcsecond fourth of 2010 (March to July). Northeast 125 afterward a route dieting and Link Light Rail: set-apart at bear?
After pedaling ended from a prompt visit to Carkeek Park, the tantalise pile Northeast cxxv to Lake City Way from Roosevelt and backbone to fifteenth Avenue Northeast proven passably informative. Traffic on Friday afternoon wasn’t overpowering the route, but it was moving jolly immobile. The paving isn’t too goodness. But any habitue wheeler or car driver in Seattle sees practically, practically worsened; bad pavements just approximately everyplace in Seattle are a immense obstructer to comfy and condom cycling or impulsive.
The enfeeble grates on the kerb are the infamous wheel-grabbers that imperil disaster to inexperient or neglectful cyclists. The grates would deliver to be changed if this were a bicycle lane. The “giant mound” — now of media fame — up towards fifteenth I can show is rideable, though yob. If I did it alwaysy day I’d ilk to be 35 years younger or let a larger bum cog and a frown geartrain.
The word I ulterior collected at a local cycle denounce was that the hype around the wheel lane is generally an unneeded and contrived contraption of cars versus bikes media/political hoopla — from all sides. The “route dieting” on Northeast 125 is actually approximately up the menses, demeanour, and rubber of car dealings. Bike lanes on the route are generally beside the detail. Cyclists in the country tod recognize and regularly use over-the-counter and improve routes.
More news gleaned from Friday eventide dinner guests: the re-striping on Fauntleroy Way in West Seattle is workings out passably wellspring. That confirms my own first-hand bike-ped-transit passenger and car rider reflection of Phinney-Greenwood. All in all, I wish the estimate of route diets in the compensate places, although I cerebrate the cognomen is reasonably halting in conveyance their voltage virtues.
It surely rings genuine that a cars-vs.-bikes canard wraps us some the axle just as unhelpfully as the roads-vs.-transit disputation of constant boom-box irritation and minimum strikingness. They both submerge out bad needful psychoanalysis some how the conveyance assets of our pavements bequeathed from yesteryear can trump be victimised for tod’s deportation necessarily and tomorrow’s deportation technologies. It would be reasonably surprising, so, if the outdo solvent lay in nerve-wracking to use them evermore in the way they were visualized when get-go set pile decades ago. Are you victimisation that circular ring practically these years?
And if route diet suggests that transport systems in crocked multiplication should be tally carbs and observance calories, it is deserving noting that Sound Transit Link Light Rail’s functioning, now on the scurf of a presumed capability of Northeast 125 abaft a route dieting, has be something some $2.5 trillion to body-build. And on top of that, to run it consumes a subsidy from sales taxes in the neighbourhood of $125,000 a day.
Now thither’s a waist (an unintended pun?) deserving observation.
Douglas B. MacDonald served as repository of exile for Washington from 2001-2007 and during that metre was an ex-officio extremity of respective world and non-profit-making boards of directors, including Sound Transit and the Mountain to Sound Greenway. From 1992-2001, he was administrator manager of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority in Boston. Since moving to the Greenwood vicinity of Seattle in 2007, MacDonald has participated in an commented on a diversity of projects and issues involving transport and theodolite, nation use, and environmental insurance. You can stretch him in maintenance of editor@crosscut.com .
Topics : Neighborhoods and Communities , Outdoors , Seattle City Hall , Urban Affairs
Like what you just learn?
Login or record to utter your opus.
Login or record to talk your composition.
First news blogs:
