My tire wobbled and I swerved to correct my path. A car hissed by me while the driver laid on his horn, just to remind me of his presence in case I hadn’t realized from the roar of the 2,000 pounds of steel bearing down on me that he was inches away. Or maybe he was trying to remind me that a bike didn’t belong on this road.
Of course, six years ago, the city decided that bikes did belong on this road. After years of study and community engagement, Mayor Mike McGinn proposed, the city council passed, and Mayor Ed Murray signed into law the city’s 2014 Bicycle Master Plan into law. In addition to protected bike routes and pedestrian improvements all over the city, the plan called for nearly three miles of uninterrupted, protected bike lanes on 35th Avenue Northeast, stretching all the way to Lake City. In 2015, voters overwhelmingly approved paying for that plan. In 2017, the city council again agreed to build 1.2 miles of that bike lane. But recently, those bike lanes got scrapped when a bunch of bike-hating homeowners and Mayor Jenny Durkan got involved.
Nathalie Graham covers anything she finds fun, weird, or interesting. You can find a lot of that in her column, Play Date. Her work has also appeared around town in The Seattle Times, GeekWire, and the... More by Nathalie Graham