Washington is Best for Bikes

No really. It's true. According to the League of American Bikes (via the Cascade Bicycle Alliance in our case), Washington is the most bicycle friendly state in the union. According to the LAB, "Washington’s model bike laws, signed and mapped statewide bike route network, dedicated funding from the state for bicycle related programs and projects, and an active statewide bicycle advisory committee" are reasons that the state earned top honors above Wisconsin, Arizona, Oregon (numbers two, three and four respectively) and all the others.

The Cascade Bicycle Alliance also reported today that Seattle earned a Gold rating from LAB because of the city's "commitment to and investment in improving conditions for bicyclists."

Judges from the League of American Bicyclists were impressed with Seattle's Bicycle Master Plan, projected to develop a 450-mile bicycling network over the next 10 years.

Apparently, Seattleites are no slouches when it comes to commuting by bike. A full 4 percent of us do it, the Alliance reports, which is 10 percent above the national average.

In other bike news, again courtesy of Cascade Bicycle Alliance, Mayor Nickels proposed funding to build the last "missing segment" of the Burke-Gilman Trail.

The trail, as anyone who has ever ridden, walked or run on it knows, is an awesome example of a functional urban trail, stretching from somewhere up on the North end of Lake Washington, all the way out to Golden Gardens Park. But there is still one mile-and-a-half long hole on the Burke-Gilman Trail between the West side of Fred Meyer in Ballard and the Ballard Locks. Nickels wants to spend $8.6 million in his next budget to complete that last link over the next two years. According to Cascade, funding will come from the Bridging the Gap levy funds dedicated to bike and trail improvements, the 2007 King County Proposition 2 Trail and Open Space levy, and from grants.

Now, if someone could just come up with a functional fix for the South end of the Ballard Bridge, we might just actually buy that Gold rating. Still, kudos to Nickels and the Cascade Bicycle Alliance for working hard to improve the state of bicycling infrastructure in the city. What they're doing may not be perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than what we had before.

thanks for putting that picture in our Flickr Pool borborigma.