It’s been 30 years in the making, but people were finally allowed to bike on the upper West Seattle Bridge. For a few hours, anyway. The 2024 Emerald City Ride on Sunday routes people south on the SR-99 viaduct through SoDo and then up onto the West Seattle Bridge, a limited access freeway typical reserved only for motor vehicles. Well, when it isn’t on the verge of falling into the Duwamish River that is. Luckily, it did not fall down while I and about 3,000 others were biking across it. It was the first Emerald City Ride since 2019, and it was great to see one of Cascade Bicycle Club’s most ..read more

Promo image from the Seattle Yacht Club. The Montlake Bridge will be held in the open-to-boats position for the Seattle Yacht Club’s annual boating season opening day celebration Saturday (May 4) from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Depending on your destination, detouring to the University Bridge can be rough if you’ve never done it before. Boyer Avenue E is the only direct and reasonably flat option, but it does not have bike lanes and is extra busy when one of the two bridges is closed. If that is not appealing to you, I suggest detouring via Interlaken Blvd if possible. It is much slower and requires mo ..read more

Amber Weilert at the 2024 Cascade Bicycle Club Bike Everywhere Lunch. When I saw Amber Weilert’s name on the speaker’s list for Cascade Bicycle Club’s Bike Everywhere Lunch Monday, I looked around at the large room full of people talking with old friends, networking, and glad-handing with local politicians and thought, A lot of these people don’t yet know who Amber is, and they don’t understand what’s coming. When it was her turn to speak about the importance of safe streets work, she didn’t talk in hypotheticals or statistics. Instead, she talked about traveling to the event that morning, a t ..read more

Lots of people biked to Wilburton Station for the 2 Line opening celebration. To celebrate Sound Transit’s 2 Line opening over the weekend, my kid and I biked across the 520 Bridge to a station that seems destined to play a special role in connecting biking and transit on Eastside. The newly-opened Wilburton Station is basically part of the EasTrail. The connection for trail users is seamless, easy and thoughtful. Planners clearly valued the synergy between the new light rail line and the under-construction trail. The result is a station that could be the 2 Line’s answer to UW Station on the 1 ..read more

Concept map for a clockwise RAMROD route. Subject to change. One of the most difficult one-day bike rides anywhere on earth just got a little more difficult. Riders will have two fewer hours of sunlight to complete their 150-mile ride around Mount Rainier this year. But I doubt riders will mind too much because after months of uncertainty, organizers announced this week that the iconic Ride Around Mount Rainier in One Day (“RAMROD”) will happen in 2024. After a couple months of butting heads with officials at Mount Rainier National Park and negotiating with the help of Rep. Kim Schrier, the Re ..read more

The Shoreline Bike Shack is part of the Shoreline Tool Library. A few years ago, Ryan Townsend needed a cheap way to get his bike fixed. His search led him to the NE Seattle Tool Library, which had absorbed the volunteer-run Bike Shack. Not only did he find the tools and advice he needed, he also found a community. “I started volunteering with essentially no experience other than how to adjust my brakes,” Townsend said. “It’s really cool to be able to meet all my neighbors and help out.” Now he not only has bike repair skills, he is the member of the tool library’s steering committee in charge ..read more

The bicycle facilities map in the mayor’s proposed Seattle Transportation Plan. After making very few changes, the City Council passed the Seattle Transportation Plan (“STP”) this week, supplanting the 2014 Bicycle Master Plan and sending it to the city archives. The STP is an ambitious document that attempts to combine all the city’s modal plans and transportation priorities into a single mega plan, resolving as many modal conflicts in advance of project development. Project development should go much more smoothly since the guidance for each street has been predetermined at a high level. Or ..read more

The Move Redmond Station Access Map’s bike and transit overview (PDF). Online version and other views are available on the Move Redmond website. Physical copies will be available at various community events like the 2 Line opening celebration and the Move Redmond open streets festivals June 22 and August 17. It has been a long time since King County stopped maintaining a bike map. Seattle releases their updated map every year, but it ends at the city limits. But folks biking on the Eastside are mostly left to cobble together route info from wherever they can find it. That’s why I have been ver ..read more

The King County trail network is on the precipice of next-level greatness. Our regional trails are already backbones for recreation and bicycle transportation, but major sections and connections along the EasTrail are just now coming online with more coming in the next couple years. The East Lake Sammamish Trail also opened last year, closing a long and difficult chapter in the county’s trail-building history. With each completed section, the region’s trails grow closer and closer to becoming a fully functional network that can bring together communities that for so long have felt far apart du ..read more

I sure hope you didn’t have any other plans on Sunday, because you can do bikes bikes bikes morning ’til night. Bike Works Executive Director Ed Ewing pitched to Seattle Bike Blog that people could attempt a Ride for Major Taylor/Bikecitement doubleheader. Are you up for the challenge? Route map for the long route, from Cascade. The day kicks off with Cascade Bicycle Club’s annual Ride for Major Taylor, which is quietly one of the the organization’s best rides of the year. And this year’s long route will be a banger. It’s a 62-mile loop that starts in White Center and heads south to Tacoma bef ..read more