Results tagged “bicycles”

The main impediment to bicycle commuting in Seattle is that there's no direct route from where all the bike people live (north of the ship canal, mostly) to where all the jobs are (Downtown). So why not just make Aurora bike-only? FACT: Anyone driving down Aurora in a car who needed to get Downtown could just cut over on 85th Avenue North and catch the freeway there.

             

The trains will open with service from Westlake to Tukwila on July 18. It will be free to ride on the 18th and 19th with paid service starting on Monday, July 20. The base ticket price will be $1.75 with a .05-cent increase with every mile. When the Tukwila to SeaTac section opens in December, it will cost $2.25 from Westlake to the airport. Trains come about every 7.5 minutes during peak times, and every 15 minutes otherwise.

"Untitled" by shirtnpants , from our Flickr pool

This past weekend we stopped by 20/20 Cycle after checking out the This Is A Powerful Corner art installation at 23rd & Union. We were pleasantly surprised by 20/20's selection of road bikes, since they had more to choose from than usual.

The Congressional Bike Caucus, founded by Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Portland, gets a boost from the NYT. In case you're wondering who represents for the spokes-folks in Washington State, it's alternative-energy friendly Jay Inslee, Adam Smith, Rick Larsen, and Jim McDermott.

This just in from BikePortland: Price Media, the publishing stalwarts who bring you Outdoors Nw (sic on the small "w") magazine, have cooked up a new magazine, NW Cyclist. It'll be published just once per year; the premiere issue will be available in March 2009 at the Seattle Bike Expo. We were bemoaning the lack of a bright spot in any industry during this recession and we totally didn't think about bikes. Bikes are pretty hot right now. Newspapers, the Seattle Weekly reminds us, are not. We are so close to being a no-daily-newspaper town right now.

These days Seattlest's skateboarding activity is limited almost exclusively to a few lazy longboard turns on the Burke-Gilman every once in a while, and the Wall of Death bank under the University Bridge (the skate spot that is literally dwarfed by the gigantic monument to it across the path) was one of our little pleasures on those rides. Just a quick up and down and we were on our way. Back in the day, though, we could have spent countless hours skating that spot, so when we saw a post about the recent safe-ification/ruination of that bank over on the Slog it hit us pretty hard:

• MyBallard clears up the confusion about when it is actually okay to drive in 15th's bus lane.
• PhinneyWood has photos to show what happens when a car gets t-boned by a metro bus, careens into a parked car, and sends the once-parked car crashing on to a Phinney Ridge porch.
• Ron Sims twitters about what good shape Dan Savage is in, the P-I's Big Blog reports it, and now we're linking to the P-I. We really are all connected.

Isabella Pinarello_Nigel Raleigh_120scan by kjten22

          

The Tour de Fat bicycle festival, sponsored by New Belgium Brewery, took place at Gasworks Park today. Naturally we bicycled over to see what it was all about. On the way, two guys in a pickup pulled up next to us and rolled down the window. Uh oh, we thought. "Hey, nice bike!" they yelled. "And nice shirt!" (We were wearing the cream of our Hawaiian shirt collection.) They gave us a thumbs up. Then they roared off again. Tour de Fat was kinda like that.

7 p.m., Friday // El Chupacabra, 6711 Greenwood Ave // 21+

In the wake of a brutal tussle between car and bicycle last weekend, it's good that New Belgium Brewing's Tour de Fat, the "traveling celebration of all things bicycle," arrives in town on Saturday, opposite the carbon-spewing, combustion engine worship-fest that is Seafair, what with the supersonic jets and souped-up motorboats.

Keeping with our three-day-old, all-bike-news, all-the-time theme, we see the Seattle P-I has a story about bike racks filling up all over Seattle. The city is installing 300 new bike racks per year (toward a goal of doubling availability by 2017), so if you want one, ask for one. The racks outside Liberty and Hopvine on 15th are often three bikes deep these fine summer days, and the racks outside Madison Market should come with a take-a-number dispenser. We put in a request a few months ago but must have been the only ones, because the block in front of Nordstrom downtown is still rack-free. You can actually buy some cycling-style clothing at Nordy's--guess they don't plan on you actually using it.

WATCH THE TOUR DE FRANCE: The Cascade Bicycle Club presents its annual Cyclefest. There's something for everyone--races for those who like to watch, a bike decorating station for those who like to do, and a lot of people in spandex for those who like to drool. After the sun goes down, watch the 17th stage of the Tour de France (that's the part where they race up the Alps. The Alps!) on a big screen. Wheel-less and feeling lucky? Enter the raffle for a bike worth $4,000.

Thrilled with our ongoing summer weather, wanting to take advantage of it while we can, Seattlest hopped on the bike on Saturday and headed downtown. We haven't given nearly enough face time to Olympic Sculpture Park since it was pulled together, so that was our real destination. We had a book in our sack, and intended to just lie in the warm grass and read. Of course, once we got biking, we couldn't stop ourselves. It's so easy going down Capitol Hill to the waterfront, it just made sense to forge on.

HUGE AMOUNTS OF CHEESE: The Cheese Festival is upon us! This is one of our top three favorite events of the year (#2: our birthday, #3: Christmas). Several reasons: a city block full of cheese, friendly vendors, wholesale prices on bottles in the wine garden (don't buy the red wine that says "bacon" three times in its description, we made that mistake last year), and (it bears repeating) a city block full of cheese.

"Norton at the Record Store" by seattlerealtorgal