What happened to Seattle cyclists taking over the streets to demand change? Our local Critical Mass movement appears to be all but dead. The Cascade Bicycle Club—one of the largest municipal bike advocacy groups in the country—is considering whether to curb its political work in significant ways. This must mean we’ve reached cycling nirvana in Seattle, right? That we’re on some Amsterdam-level bike-friendliness shit? That the Emerald City is a gleaming biketopia, where we can trust in our esteemed city officials to respect and protect the city’s estimated 158,000 cyclists?
Uh, no. Of course not.
This is the fucking USA, people. The A stands for automobile. The city and state are spending $4.2 billion on a tunnel-highway-boondoggle, while the feckless Seattle City Council systematically and deliberately underfunds our $240 million Bicycle Master Plan—the plan to make city streets minimally safe and usable for cyclists—by more than half, year after year.