Breaking the Vicious Cycle

Maybe it was the most recent $50 fill-up for your supposed economy car that did it. Or the most recent price increase in the downtown parking lot you use. Or you went to see Al Gore's global-warming movie and came out feeling like you ought to do something. Maybe all of the above.

But suddenly you're noticing all those people who are commuting to work on their bikes these days—and it seems that there are a lot more of them. And you notice that a lot of them nowadays are just normal schlubs like yourself.

Suddenly, riding a bike to work seems to make a lot of sense.

After all, Seattle has a national reputation as a bike-friendly city. It should be fun and easy, right?

Well, um . . . yes and no.

Sure, it'll probably start out pleasantly enough, especially if the weather is nice. If you live, say, in the U District or Ballard and work downtown, you'll likely catch the Burke-Gilman trail over to the Fremont Bridge, then connect with Dexter Avenue, the "bicycle freeway" into downtown with designated bike lanes on each side. So far, so good.

But then, as Dexter ends at Mercer, reality hits: You're now riding in the midst of auto traffic, and lots of it. You may make a dash over to Second Avenue and take its left-hand-side bike lane—the only one in the downtown area—but that isn't a whole lot better, thanks to an assortment of left-turning vehicles that are prone to making their moves right in front of you as though you don't exist. And then there are the grates and opening car doors.

Dodging them, you get to work, all nice and sweaty and smelling like it, and discover there are no showers at your workplace. Well, maybe tomorrow you can ride slowly so as not to break into a sweat. the hill on Dexter notwithstanding.

Eight hours later, when it's time to go home, you discover that there is no northbound bike lane anywhere on downtown streets. (Third Avenue is closed at rush hour to cars, and bikes are allowed to use it northbound, but it also entails dodging major bus traffic.) So you're stuck making your way back to Dexter by riding in traffic and hoping nobody spills a latte while using their cell phone in their SUV as they drive past you. Better still are the encounters with drivers who believe that they paid for the roads and you didn't, so you better get out of their way. Much colorful language and exchange of hand signals often ensues.

There! Was that worth it?

And it's not just downtown. Commuting to the suburbs can be even worse. If you take the I-90 bike trail to the Eastside (after discovering that the crossing on the floating bridge may look nice, but it's really not very pleasant), you can tool along until it ends abruptly at Eastgate—amid a consistently hostile snarl of auto traffic. And commuting into downtown Bellevue? Fuggedaboutit. That city was built for cars, and city fathers seem intent on keeping it that way. Kirkland, in sharp contrast, is actually fairly hospitable to bikes, while Redmond's self-proclaimed title as the "Bicycling Capital of the Northwest" (due to the velodrome at Marymoor Park) is severely undercut by its poor record in providing bike lanes along its broad boulevards.

Even if you commute to the Microsoft campus, as I did for a number of years, by using the Burke-Gilman/Sammamish River Trail, it's still a two-hour ride. You're inevitably going to want to use the bike-bus option over the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge (which has no bike path). This is the only direct route to the campus, and usually takes about an hour. While Metro's bike racks are superb—easy to use and reliable—there are only two of them per bus, and when you arrive on summer mornings at the Montlake bus stop, there can be 10 or more cyclists ahead of you. It may take a half hour before enough buses cycle through for your turn.

Seattle is supposedly bike friendly, but the system doesn't work very well for commuters.

Renee McMahon

In other words, the Seattle area's oft-touted bicycling system is actually a happenstance, an often broken network that doesn't function particularly well, especially when it comes to providing a complete infrastructure that could encourage people to take up bike commuting.

Andrew Galbraith, who moved here last year from the San Francisco Bay Area—where he also used to commute by bike—has found, in his year of commuting from Fremont to Pioneer Square, that Seattle's bike-friendly reputation isn't everything it's cracked up to be. "I think that it probably got that reputation because people look at things like the Burke- Gilman trail or Green Lake and think, 'Oh, there's bike paths,' because that's what the city is promoting, but the reality of actually commuting is different," he says. "It's one thing for people like myself who are avid bicyclists, but certainly somebody who doesn't bike much and thinks it might be a new way to commute, they might find it frightening. Especially downtown."