The 520 Bridge Trail will be closed between Montlake and Evergreen Point starting 11 p.m. tonight (May 10) until early morning Monday (May 13). Lake Washington Boulevard will also be closed between Montlake Boulevard and the Arboretum. The short section of 24th Ave E south of Lake Washington Boulevard, which is part of the Lake Washington Loop bike route, will be closed as well, though you would not really be able to get there due to the Lake Washington Blvd. closure, anyway. Montlake Boulevard will be open. Riders should be able to take the east sidewalk on Montlake Blvd. to E North Street ..read more

Seattle Bike Blog’s photo review of the book. “When I share the fact that a third of people in the United States can’t, or can’t afford to, drive, usually my audience is incredulous,” writes Seattle resident Anna Letitia Zivarts in her book “When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency” out today from Island Press. Zivarts will be speaking 7:30 Monday at Town Hall Seattle’s Wyncote NW Forum on First Hill with Barb Chamberlain and Tanisha Sepúlveda. Sliding scale tickets are $5-$25. That one-third estimate is almost certainly an undercount since it does not fully account for ..read more

We had a lovely Bike to School Day today. There were 68 bikes parked at Green Lake Elementary, and even more kids rode in on a parent’s bike. There was so much joy and so many proud kids. Biking to school is just the best. Since my kid has been regularly biking to school on her own, her traffic safety awareness, bike handling and hill-climbing skills have all improved dramatically. But so has her sense of responsibility, which is not an effect I was anticipating. We stressed that if she wants to bike in the street, she would need to stay focused on being safe the entire time. She rose to the ..read more

After a brief moment of excitement when Seattle Parks announced what appeared to be an expanded schedule for Bicycle Weekends this summer, the department corrected itself and confirmed that they are repeating the reduced schedule from 2023. The events previously known as Bicycle Sunday will still be a great time as they have been since 1968, but it was a bummer to get good news only to have the city take it back. There is so much demand for more community time and space on this street! Below is the updated announcement with the 2024 dates: On scheduled weekends from May to September, a porti ..read more

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