Agreed.

Pop the popcorn, we're getting a show today!

I was ticketed for failing to stop at a crosswalk once because the pedestrian turned onto the crosswalk just before I got to it. I had eye contact with her and said "Sorry!" as I weaved around her. A motorcycle cop pulled me over (this was on Denny) and gave me a moving violation for failing to stop. Said moving violation then showed up on my insurance radar and they sent me a notice that my premiums would be going up since my DRIVING record was no longer spotless. This was all about 8 years ago, so maybe they have bicycle related tickets now, who knows.

I didn't know radar was accurate on bicycles. If I ever get the point where I can ride that fast, I'll slow down.

Agreed. And having been passed by cyclists pulling some serious speed on the sidewalk on Queen Anne, I'd like to extend the range of attention.

I'm not surprised the city sees cyclists as an equal source of revenue

I'm sure no car has ever gone over the speed limit, blown thru a red light, or failed to stop at a stop sign.

Waiting for the bike haters to show up and provide some entertainment.

They can turn into road borscht or frighten drivers, but the biggest reason I'm glad they're being ticketed is because they endanger others. Scared drivers can panic and swerve into other vehicles or pedestrians, and pedestrians can be injured or killed. (In San Francisco in the past year or two, I think there have been at least two pedestrians, both elderly, killed by speeding cyclists while in crosswalks crossing with the light.)

Oh, and I want more ticketing of drivers holding their cell phones as they drive, too.

All cops need to do is hang out at the bottom of hills. Boren and Pike/Pine are excellent staging areas for both speeding tickets and red light tickets. Having lived nearby, I would see this several times a week.

Mr. Lindblom seems to think those online commenters are front page news.

@7 Did you miss the part of the report about drivers getting ticketed? And at twice the rate that bikes, too.

Fuck all that noise, Dom. You need better brakes if you can't stop on our hills. Pick up a bike with disc brakes and stop your fucking whining. As a cyclist I try to go as fast as the drivers since I'm safer that way. And no, I don't ride on the sidewalks specifically because I can't go fast on those.

Do many bicyclists have speedometers?

@13

Most road bikes have one (called a cyclocomputer), and breaking 30MPH is awfully hard to do on anything other than a true road bike.

However, it's probably harder to stop at 25MPH on a front brake-only fixed gear than at >30MPH on a road bike.

The difference between a cyclist blowing a red light or stop sign and a driver doing the same thing is the driver doesn't do it at full speed. Ticket cyclists who blow through stops.

More enforcement of traffic laws would be good for bikes, pedestrians, cars, and transit. Traffic laws that are not regularly enforced are good for flow of all forms of transportation. For example, it's illegal to begin crossing on a flashing "Don't Walk" in order to allow vehicular traffic to turn through an intersection. This law is ignored all the time and makes downtown a nightmare for everyone during peak traffic.

Most importantly, if you have a uniform code of conduct that people see being consistently reinforced, it allows you to adjust the dynamic between modes of transportation without friction - pretty much the opposite of the "bikes vs. cars vs. transit" siege mentality you see today.

@ 3, bikes exist in a kind of gray area - ypu don't need a license to ride one, but you're subject to the rules of the road. Therefore your driving record is impacted by violations made while bicycling.

I wonder how that works for those who don't have a driver's license. Am I wrong? Are you supposed to have one if you bike?

Note that they're ticketing in a 20 mph school zone. Even a gentle downgrade makes it easy to exceed 20 on a road bike.

Why are they doing this? Because there is a ton of local and federal money available for school zone/ pedestrian safety right now, and enforcement is ramping up (in school zones) to match.

Oh, and traffic engineers are actively discussing how to include bicycles in the traffic flow, with some really good insight into where, legally, cyclists fit in the mix. Every state and city can have their own vehicle code... uniformity is impossible.

Monday I was riding upwind on the Interurban from Algona to Kent. I think I was going about 3 mph...seems like when it gets sunny, it gets blowsy!

(Note to cycletrack designers...windbreaks!)

@17 Correct, except only some of the rules of the road apply to bikes, and of those only some are selectively enforced. I would be sited for driving down the sidewalk in a car, but not on a bike. So really bikes are subject to their own rules of the road, which are different than for cars. Yet my ability to drive a car is dependent on my ability to ride a bike correctly. Seems ass backward to me.

I asked about people without drivers licenses to both the cop who stopped me and the magistrate when I went to contest it and got the same "eat shit and pay up" non-answer from both of them.

Logic flaw? I think it would be just as important for bike riders to obey the rules of the road -- they are NOT driving a two-ton hunk of metal...

@ 20, I agree - I was gobsmacked to learn that bikes could be ridden on sidewalks legally in Seattle. Even in Boulder you can't do that. (Designated bike paths which double as sidewalks are different.) I think bikes should be expressly restricted to the streets and bike paths.

Personally, I find speeds over about thirty to be kinda scary, cars or no cars. Wheel vibration, irregular road surfaces and debris make it a risky deal. BTW, I have more than one pedestrian walk into me while looking back over their shoulder.....Have been hit by a car whose driver was looking left and driving right.....

I don't see what the issue here is, it's a school zone. A cyclist smacking into a kid isn't as bad as a car smacking into a kid, but it's still dangerous.

And if you cannot brake safely at a given speed, don't travel that fucking speed. It goes for bike or car.

I think allowances should be made in some cases for the differences between bikes and cars, but not in this case. Driving downhill, stay at legal traffic speeds or get ticketed. As a regular cyclist, I sometimes go 30 MPH or faster going downhill (top speed on a hilly rural road once--42 MPH), but only in places where that is at or below the speed limit and there aren't driveways and uncontrolled intersections. It's impossible to make a controlled stop at that speed in any reasonable distance, and the damage to bike, self, and bystanders at that speed could easily be fatal, and definitely significant.

In the city, keep it to under 25 MPH off the arterials, probably slower than that in many areas (even though the speed limit is usually 25), and definitely slower when slower speeds are posted.

22, I agree, but for that to work, you're going to have to re-work the streets to allow for bike paths. I don't like riding on the sidewalk, but sometimes I have to because of the way the streets are laid out. The problem is that many bike lanes are put in as an afterthought, w/o real consideration of traffic flow. The pressure-sensitive lights are not geared towards cyclists. It's a clusterfuck, and there is no simple solution. When America pulls it head out & decides that its infrastructure must serve every vehicle (including mass transit) and not be beholden to cars, then things will improve. Until then, we'll all just have to deal w/ the clusterfuck.

See it almost every morning on Freemont Ave. The ticket review system is a joke. If you want to fight a ticket, appear in court. You do not get treated fairly if you try save the City by doing it by mail.

30mph is too fast to ride in a bike lane like the one on Fremont Ave. There are too many opportunities to be cut off or doored by cars.

If you're going to do 30mph on a bike on Fremont Ave, you should take a lane and ride with all the auto traffic also doing 30mph on Fremont Ave.

No, actually, I'll scream that I see bicyclists run stop signs and traffic lights ALL THE TIME. I haven't kept a tally, but I'm pretty certain that I see bicyclists violate traffic laws at a considerably higher rate than drivers of cars, when you factor in their percentages of vehicles on the road. And that's just on streets around town in general--don't EVEN get me started on the free-for-all of bicycle-fueled mayhem that happens every day of the school year on the UW campus. I've never come as close as a pedestrian to being flattened by a car as I have been, repeatedly, by speeding bicyclists there--IN A FRICKIN' CROSSWALK that they were blowing through at the time.

Follow the traffic laws, respect my right to drive on the roads and walk on the sidewalks and crosswalks, and I'll be happy to respect yours.

Bicyclists should be able to rise as fast as they want in school zones where 7 and 8 year olds ae milling about, because, Mike Bikes.

Found the troll its @29!!!

No issue with a speeding ticket here, in fact I wish they dealt out a few more tickets in general. Just so folks like @29 would SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Driving is a privilege, and its mathematically IMPOSSIBLE for more bikes to break laws than cars, idiot.

Think of how fuct it is that its newsworthy that cops were giving cars tickets at all, and oh btw a couple of bikes.... because both are so rare. no wonder so many people text and drive. Fun fact, drinking in your car is only an infraction, like not having a litter bag! so as long as your not drunk keep a six pack handy!

It's so ironic than when you mention that traffic laws need to be enforced for bikes or that bikes shouldn't be allowed on sidewalks and 70% bikers grasp for excuses why they need to be magical exceptions.

What is it about riding a bike to work that suddenly transmogrifies liberals into Randian Libertarians.

If bike commuting is to become more popular then bikes riders are going to have be more regulated. If we want to provide for better infrastructure that includes all these options like bike lanes then we're going to have to pay for it somehow. Probably including licensing, fees, taxes, and much stricter enforcement with higher fines.

We can't have it both ways.

Of the 32,666 traffic citations issued by Seattle police in the first nine months of 2013, 346 were to bicyclists, or around 1 percent

Of the 457 road deaths in Washington state in 2011, 64 pedestrians and 11 bicyclists were killed

In the Seattle area, 83-year-old Velda Mapelli died in Renton after being hit by a bicycle in 2010

So just to add this up, we'll fudge a little. We'll pretend that the number of people killed by bicyclists in Seattle is 1 in the last 3 years. Even though the number in Seattle is zero, we'll start with 1/3 of a death per year, on average. The real number is probably closer to 1/10 to 1/20 per year. Prior to the fragile old dear who got knocked down on the outskirts of Seattle in 2010, when was the last time a cyclists killed anybody?

While cars ran down 75 people, cyclists and pedestrians, in 2011. Forget about the number of other drivers and passengers that drivers killed. Something like 400 of them. So. Much. Blood.

The number of pedestrians+cyclists killed by cyclists is, at most, 0.4% of those killed by cars. Or 0.5% if you count only pedestrians and not the 11 cyclists who were killed. Even using this upper limit of .333 pedestrians killed by cyclists per year, were ticketing cyclists at a rate at least double what you'd expect, 1%. If you use the more realistic count of 1 pedestrian killed by a cyclist every 10 years or so, then we're ticketing cyclists at a rate at 5 to 8 times what we should.

Or another way of saying that is that we're putting resources into ticketing cyclists that aren't saving any lives. At least half of the police time spent chasing cyclists would save more lives if they redirected those efforts to drivers.

@22,

I think there should be a very strict and very low speed limit for bicycles on the sidewalk. My biggest complaint about bicyclists on the sidewalk is those assholes who don't think twice about how their riding affects pedestrians.

I also think a blanket ban on bicycles on sidewalks wouldn't be fair to children in the city.

Ummm...#31, is the problem here more your reading comprehension, or your math? I didn't say that more cyclists break traffic laws than drivers of cars. Go back and read it again. C'mon, you can sound out the big words if you try.

And giving out more tickets to bicyclists won't make me shut the fuck up. Having the minority of bicyclists who ride recklessly, and make the rest of the cyclists on the road look bad, stop riding like that--THAT will make me stop complaining about them.

The funny thing is how many anti-cyclists are convinced that more cyclists break traffic laws than motorized vehicle drivers. A cyclist speeding through a red light tends to be more noticeable than a car doing the same thing, but the (illegal) behavior of cars is mostly invisible since it happens all the time. I can stand on the corner of pretty much any semi-busy intersection and watch cars blow through red lights numerous times per hour and no one blinks an eye. A lone cyclist can blow through that same intersection and witnesses will be chattering about his infraction for months.

@22: Why so gobsmacked? Riding on sidewalks is in some cases safer. And cyclists can't go crazy on sidewalks, per the law: "Every person operating a bicycle upon a sidewalk or public path shall yield the right-of-way to any pedestrian thereon, and shall give an audible signal before overtaking and passing any pedestrian". You'll find lots of bike cops using sidewalks, maybe encourage them not to set a bad example?

While Victoria, BC is very bike friendly one thing that was maddening was not being allowed to bike on sidewalks. Due to all the one-way streets I would sometimes bike on nearly empty sidewalks instead of nearly completely circling a block. But then a cop chastised me and I stopped.

@ 34, where such bans exist, they don't enforce them on kids. They might not even apply to them.

@ 38, because that regulation notwithstanding, bikes and peds don't mix unless it's some kind of path where the peds are all going in one direction, like Green Lake or Burke Gilman. Downtown or Capitol Hill, peds are coming, going, stopping suddenly, appearing out of shops and lobbies, etc. It's more chaotic and vehicles traveling faster than peds have less room for dealing with the unexpected. At least on the road there are rules everyone knows.

That said, yes, sometimes you have to get off the street for your own safety.

Every person operating a bicycle upon a sidewalk or public path shall yield the right-of-way to any pedestrian thereon, and shall give an audible signal before overtaking and passing any pedestrian.

Then cops need to start ticketing bicyclists for breaking these laws. While bicyclists *sometimes* yield for pedestrians, I have never, not once, received an audible signal from a bicyclist who was trying to pass me on the sidewalk.

@15- The difference is usually that a car slows from 30 to 5 and a cyclist slows from 12 to 8. The bike isn't going much faster than a car, but it didn't slow as much.

@40: You're talking about high density areas. And yes, riding on sidewalks there is usually dumb. Go to other areas though and take a look. Most parents would prefer their kids bike on the sidewalk around their house instead of having to be in the street.

@ 43, you're addressing me as if I didn't also make the comment @ 39.

Anyway, as the parent and uncle of bike riding children in a residential area, I tell them to ride in the street, not on the sidewalk. Carefully, with helmets, and out of the way of cars. Once they mastered it - they rode on the sidewalks before they were ready for the street.

@15, I know it's far away, but if you ever find yourself in DC and want to see some drivers blowing stop signs and red lights at full speed, I'd welcome you to come hang out with me in my neighborhood for a spell. Morning and evening rush hour are peak time for seeing quantity, but later in the evening features people who are already speeding not even touching the brakes. At least daily, I see someone run through our stop sign (right outside my living room window) at 35+ (in a 25). While I've seen some reckless cyclists in my life, very rarely have I seen one blow through a stop device (sign, light) at more than 20, just by virtue of it being harder to get to that speed on a bike.

@16, only if those flashing signals are re-timed for the "average" walker rather than my great-great grandmother zombified. Many of our crosswalks start flashing the hand with almost 20 (out of 30-60) seconds left on the clock. In my experience, it takes me about 10 seconds to cross a 6-lane road. So, yeah, I start crossing so long as I have 10 or more seconds remaining, no matter what the icon says. Bonus points that, if the flashing hand were enforced, in our downtown, it would make it nigh impossible to cross east-west. East-west signals are only 30 seconds, while north-south are 60 (sometimes more, usually when there's a traffic problem and they're re-set to manage vehicular traffic...today most of one N-S road was shut down so the signal was re-set to 75 seconds N-S). So, I could wait up to 90 seconds (including yellow cycles, or TWO MINUTES in today's circumstance) to cross a street, because the flashing hand is set for the speed of a snail on barbiturates. Drivers already get 48-60' of road space to my 6' or fewer, and regularly behave like a moron and put me in danger, I'm not willing to give them any more.

@47, it's not the fact that you can cross the street before the light goes solid red. It's giving the cars who want to turn onto the street you're crossing a chance to do so.