New York Beats Us to the Punch (Again)

That headline was designed to hector Seattle because we know how awful it is for this part of the world to be compared to New York City. But showing Seattle how New York does something better seems to produce results (the M's notwithstanding). This time they're creating truly bike-friendly streets.

It's always been unbelievable to us how Seattle presents itself as an uber-environmentally friendly city, while drivers clog the freeways in Hummers, voters kill the monorail, and when we finally get some real mass rapid transit built, the vote on a proposed expansion of it is tied to expanding highways as well, which drives the County Executive who continually puts his neck on the line for transit to take no position on the initiative.

Bikes though, should be a no-brainer around here. They're low impact on the environment, good for our health, fun, and don't add to traffic congestion.

Now we've been deeply involved in some of the skirmishes between bicycle riders and drivers in this city, missed being slammed by a car door more times than we can count, and have taken our life into our hands trying to merge around countless SUVs after crossing the Ballard Bridge. So it's not entirely surprising to us that although Seattle's Master Bike Plan is one of the best steps forward for bike riders in the States, it falls way short of Europe, where physical barriers are the norm as far as on-road lanes go.

What does surprise us is that New York City is putting in bike lanes that physically separate riders from drivers. There are a variety of issues that need to be fixed on the region's bike system, and Seattle's Master Bike Plan is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough.

You'd think that the mayor of a "green" city such as ours, who is trying to be the greenest mayor in the states, would have been all over an idea like this one. But no, instead, he's let us down and allowed us to be beat out by New York City again.

Yes, it costs more money to build a barrier between bikes and cars to create "a complete, continuous, interconnected network of named bicycle roads or 'tracks,' each marked and lit, each governed by traffic signs and signals of its own." (via) But doing so has amazing benefits including the ability to move six times more people per meter of lane width than motorized lanes. That's a lot more people moving around a lot faster than they do in our current traffic congestion quagmire.

Not here though. Here, we might get some new lanes on some roads (if business doesn't have its way) and meanwhile, New York City's mayor is looking more and more like a truly green candidate for president we could get behind.

The picture is called "Capitol Hill" and was taken by Chona Kasinger who gracefully added it to the Seattlest Photo Pool.