Hey Ansel...Remember a few months back when I said that SDOT does not give two shits about bicycling …, and you kind of gave ma a hard time? Guess I was kind of right, huh?
Makes you miss Mayor McGinn. Of course the solution is obvious: suck it up, spend the money, and put a real concrete separating curb down the whole length of the thing.
The lack of maintenance on the Broadway "protected" bike lane is ridiculous. In the section between Fir & Yesler, the bollards are often sticking far into the lane, so I get off my bike and push them back into place. They're really not that heavy. A good push with two hands puts them back into place. One of these days, someone's going to fly over their handlebars because they didn't see the bollard sticking out into the lane as they zip down the hill. Most of the little plastic posts are also gone, the "Stop for bikes and peds when turning" sign at Jefferson was knocked down weeks ago and not replaced, and the Southbound bike signal at James has been pointing toward the motor vehicle lanes since November.
Every time Ansel posts a picture bitching about the Broadway cycletrack, it is 100% void of cyclists. I work right nearby, and that's how it always is.
I bike to work every day, and I've used this cycletrack a few times. The intersections are hella confusing. There is a high volume of motorized traffic turning left and right across the path. You end up stopping at too many red lights. Pedestrians mill around in the middle of the track waiting for green lights. And now these fucking smurf turds.
Why the fuck would any cyclist use this urban planning brain fart of a cycletrack when there are no less than 8 calm, peaceful avenues running parallel to Broadway on either side that offer a pleasant and safer ride?
This is a complete and utter failure. Either return the lane to cars, or turn it into a pea patch, because it's useless in its current function.
Why were these things even used in the first place? They co$t more and don't even fulfill the intended function. Surely there is a name attached to the nincompoop who requisitioned these things?
Waaa....waaaa...wwwaaaa!!! The City is doing more and more everyday to make driving a car painful and make riding a bike wonderful. Quit yer bellyachin'! Soon there will be no cars in Seattle and businesses will be shutting down, since no one can park there. Then let's see whose turn it is to cry. No business, no jobs, no opportunity for you to cry about low wages, when there's no wages.
Thanks for holding their feet to the fire on this, Ansel. They'd never let this happen in a motor vehicle travel lane, and they shouldn't let it happen here.
Why is the city subsidizing cars driven by non citizens over bikes used by property tax paying Seattle citizens? Who do they think pays for roads? Ain't suburban drivers ...
You want something to bitch about? Why don't we bitch about the fact that Broadway and Jackson were torn up for ages, so that the streetcar line could be put in, the rails have been down for what? a year? Where are the streetcars? What a joke.
@11 These things aren't a "design option" as they are NOT PERMANENTLY ANCHORED TO THE GROUND. They don't build curbs that can willfully be moved by hand, now do they? Someone obviously thought theses would be "cute" without a singular pragmatic thought of the brain.
Pretty pathetic @9 thinks all commerce depends on cars. Do you think people will sit at home and die of starvation? Try experiencing the outside world beyond Bellevue Square.
1. They aren't really "bollards" -- a bollard is a vertical post strong enough to stop a vehicle.
2. They don't belong next to traffic, they aren't reflectorized or brightly-colored as standards would normally require for obstructions in the roadway, that's part of why drivers constantly run into them.
3. They're hazardous to people driving and people bicycling when they get shoved into traffic. Standard traffic delineators are tested for crashworthiness, there's a national standard for testing to make sure they aren't a hazard. Can SDOT produce crashworthiness testing documentation for the smurf turds?
@9 just because the city made things worse for drivers on Broadway doesn't mean they made things better for bicyclists. The street is now awful for both. Most people on bikes now take other routes, 12th is safer, faster, and calmer.
Since no one else ever seems to actually report this shit, prefering just to bitch about it forever, I took the liberty of filing a street-maintanance request with SDOT about the newly misplaced smurf-turds.
If a "bollard" is out of place, use this form (the same one as for potholes) to report it - SDOT will come out immediately and move it back.
If there's a downed/vandalized/missing sign, use this form to report it, and SDOT will immediately replace it.
I think you'll find using those two links frequently is a lot more effective at getting SDOT to fix things than bitching about them in the comments.
Fucking cycle track is always full of broken glass and other assorted detritus as well. Imagine if car lanes were littered with nails for days at a time. What a bunch of bullshit lip-service SDOT.
This is really a shame, but how is this different from the enormous potholes -- actually, mini-sinkholes -- that crop up on residential streets? I'm not an anti-cyclist by any means, but I don't think you can label this as "anti-bike" when the reality is that the city of Seattle clearly doesn't give a shit about our roads in general. I live in the Meadowbrook neighborhood, and I drive every single day on a road with potholes that are so huge that it constitutes a real safety concern. I think that the state of our roads in Seattle, for drivers OR cyclists, is an absolute disgrace.
Roads are dreadful for everyone. There's a pothole in front of Harborview that is literally 4' wide. That "bollard" is probably the product of our public art welfare complex, and unless we figure out a way to collect an appropriate amount of taxes, things are unlikely to get better.
But the simpletons of this state recoil from the very words "income tax" because they prefer to continue to subsidize the wealthy, believing the quaint canard that the rich will depart en masse if we were to make them pay for their fair share (Personally, I wish they would, but that's another matter).
It would be so great if an angry mob popped them out with 6 foot long steel pry bars and marched down to the Muni Building and tossed them into SDOT's lobby? Those pinhead engineers likely resent the public pressure that bore down on them after a beloved cyclist died riding on the old 4th Avenue bike lane. It wouldn't surprise me if it also takes them decades to fix this problem. Seattle: the City That Doesn't Work.
Seriously wondering.
I bike to work every day, and I've used this cycletrack a few times. The intersections are hella confusing. There is a high volume of motorized traffic turning left and right across the path. You end up stopping at too many red lights. Pedestrians mill around in the middle of the track waiting for green lights. And now these fucking smurf turds.
Why the fuck would any cyclist use this urban planning brain fart of a cycletrack when there are no less than 8 calm, peaceful avenues running parallel to Broadway on either side that offer a pleasant and safer ride?
This is a complete and utter failure. Either return the lane to cars, or turn it into a pea patch, because it's useless in its current function.
fucking loads of dori monsoon jrs. around here lately.
2. They don't belong next to traffic, they aren't reflectorized or brightly-colored as standards would normally require for obstructions in the roadway, that's part of why drivers constantly run into them.
3. They're hazardous to people driving and people bicycling when they get shoved into traffic. Standard traffic delineators are tested for crashworthiness, there's a national standard for testing to make sure they aren't a hazard. Can SDOT produce crashworthiness testing documentation for the smurf turds?
If a "bollard" is out of place, use this form (the same one as for potholes) to report it - SDOT will come out immediately and move it back.
If there's a downed/vandalized/missing sign, use this form to report it, and SDOT will immediately replace it.
I think you'll find using those two links frequently is a lot more effective at getting SDOT to fix things than bitching about them in the comments.
Seriously.
But the simpletons of this state recoil from the very words "income tax" because they prefer to continue to subsidize the wealthy, believing the quaint canard that the rich will depart en masse if we were to make them pay for their fair share (Personally, I wish they would, but that's another matter).