Results tagged “bikes”

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 swashbuckling Seafair Pirates landed on the beaches of West Seattle on Saturday, officially kicking off Seafair 2009.
• The police are on the lookout for a four-door red Saturn or Chevy Cavalier with "fancy hubcaps" that they believe was involved in a shooting Saturday night on the 8100 block of 48th Avenue South. No one was injured, just a car and empty home found with a few bullet holes.
• No one's sayin' there's a ban on washing your car at home, here in Washington. But if you happen to suds up the trusty automobile, the powers that be strongly recommend washing the car over gravel or grass to filter the dirty water.

"Untitled" by shirtnpants , from our Flickr pool

In addition MvB's weekend traffic warning, we must also warn you about Critical Masshole's evening plans. They, being the enormous dick-splashes that they are, will start this evening's ride at 5:30 p.m. at Westlake Center. Route undetermined.

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.

Isabella Pinarello_Nigel Raleigh_120scan by kjten22

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 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.

Not to belabor this story, but we think the issue of the rights of bicycle riders to the road is an important one. We ride on the city streets every day and, though some commenters on our post about changes we'd like to see made to Critical Mass in Seattle think that every driver goes out of his or her way to be respectful to us, we know it's not true. Seattle still has a lot to do for bike riders. Our streets are not very safe, nor welcoming to us.

For the record, this Seattlest is a daily bike commuter who knows and appreciates the rights and responsibilities of biking in an urban environment. We also have a friend who was beaten by cops a couple years ago during a Critical Mass demonstration. While this post isn’t specifically about Friday’s incident at Seattle's Critical Mass on Capitol Hill, the event (and one just as scary in New York City) moved us to share these thoughts.

GIRLS WITH STRONG GASTROCS: The Pacific Northwest Highland Games are up in Enumclaw this weekend! Have you ever seen a troupe of Highland dancers, or examined any of their calves? Those ladies have serious plantar flexion skillz. And the National Highland Dance Competition's not all that's going down. We're talking pub piping, Scottish sing-alongs, a full-blown ceilidgh (it's more than just a barn dance!) and of course the field games! Seattlest's Scottish blood thrills to the thought.

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.

Why can't Seattle get a bike-sharing program of our own, a la Washington, D.C.'s new "SmartBike DC"? Our city has a dedicated (at times, frighteningly dedicated) cadre of bicyclists who will shoot down objections that Seattle's just not bike-friendly. If we can embrace Zipcar, as undoubtedly Seattle has, we should be able to get a "SmartBike Seattle" program up and running successfully in no time.

Seattlest has found a reason for everyone to welcome bicycles on the city's streets. The origins lie in Virgin Vacations' (has anyone asked The Name Inspector to do a write up on Richard Branson's desire to cater to virgins?) naming of the world's 11 most bike-friendly cities. Unfortunately, Seattle didn't make the list (Portland came in at number 2), which uses five criteria created by The Bicycle Friendly Communities Campaign to judge a community's bike...

There is something seriously wrong in this city right now. The fight between drivers and bicyclists has been brewing for years, but recently it seems to be reaching a boiling-over point. It pushes what we consider to be sane people, on both sides of the argument, into a state of rage that we honestly find a bit frightening.

#1 on our list of events for the weekend is the Elysian Pumpkin Beer Festival this Saturday up at the Capitol Hill location. There will be 13 different pumpkin beers on tap, including the GABF silver-medal-winning The Great Pumpkin Ale. Festivities begin at noon with the tapping of the Great Pumpkin at 4pm; a huge pumpkin in which a batch of Night Owl carried out its secondary fermentation. Yum.

Well Dan, I guess you don't even need a bike and a mountain anymore. Here is a RedBull biking event in Budapest--I guess if we can build mountain bike trails under the freeway, they can race their bikes in the subway.

The operative word, of course, is "considering," because by no means is a bike park at Stevens Pass a done deal. But the plans are surprisingly detailed and specific, which gives Seattlest hope. The local biking community is all a-twitter about the prospects. Each year we trek up to Whistler repeatedly for our downhill biking fix (that's a friend pictured on a black diamond Whistler trail at the right), and we'd much rather spend less time in the car and more time on our bike. No, the sad irony of driving long distances to ride bikes is not lost on us.

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.

The Seattle Times has a quickie little snippet about some ski resort ownership swapping, namely that Boyne USA has bought the Summit at Snoqualmie from Booth Creek. At first we were a little concerned, namely because Booth Creek has a great track record from a customer service perspective, especially when they extended our season's pass for free after the disastrous winter of 05-06. But after a little more research, we're very excited because this is excellent news for mountain bikers.

The weekend arrived, along with all 40 of our bike clinic clients. Everyone was giddy at the thought of a heli-drop bike ride on Sunday, and the bike clinic was going off without a hitch. Until Sunday, when we ended up again at 9,000 feet, with the sun replaced by snow. Blowing snow, to be precise. And we had a freelance journalist writing for the London Sunday Times riding with us. You know, something like the second largest paper...in the world. We were supposed to show him a fantastic time, and once the flakes started falling we knew everyone was in for an adventure, but not the kind they had signed up for. We'll let our intrepid journalist tell the rest of the story, in the meantime we'll revel in the glory of going down in print as the mountain biking guide who led him astray. And yet we will continue to insist that you're only truly lost if you don't know where you are--we knew where we were, it just wasn't where we wanted to be.

Today Mayor Nickels announced a new Seattle motorcycle medic team that will be patrolling the streets in 2008. They can weave in and out of traffic and get to incident sites faster than an ambulance (although we've seen motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic, and...who's going to come out when the motorcycle EMTs go down?) and other cities are doing it, so why shouldn't we? Of course, they're not going to give you a lift to Harborview.

Seattlest's heart's cockles always get warmed when we see a bunch of people who choose to ride their bikes to get around get together, so we were predisposed to love Northwest Film Forum's Second Seattle Annual Bike-In last night. (Almost getting slammed by a driver opening her car door while riding over probably added to our joy at making it there.)

Our new workout regimen involves coasting down Pine to downtown, eating lunch, and bicycling back up to the Hill. If it works, we'll call it the 7-Minute Miracle! (Actually, even if it doesn't.) Often we pull up in front of Pacific Place, where there are four or more bike racks -- the kind of convenience we'd never noticed until we got pedals of our own. Today we were headed to the Nordstrom's Grill (the old boys' club in the basement of Nordstrom's, with a top-notch blackened salmon Caesar salad) and we biked the length of Pine in front and came up bike rack-less. So we peeked around the west side. Nuthin'. Honestly, not one? We biked back up to Pacific Place, past the Greenpeace sidewalk guys ("Aw, biker dude! You're savin' the planet, dude! Way to go!") and tied up at a hitching post there. We're still puzzled -- not that Nordstrom's has tons of people piling in on bikes, but that they're not making an effort to gladden their ecotopian customers' hearts with Nordstrom-brand bike racks out front. That's the Nordstrom touch. Maybe they're all on the north side, like moss? Or are bike racks just too pleb?

Via our Reader Tipline, Seattlest has been alerted that some mook stole a pink Rodriguez tandem. It was last seen in Ballard on Thursday evening, July 19. Theft in Ballard! Well, there goes the neighborhood.

Summertime lunch (pasta, Frascati) with our Paris Pal, and Seattlest carries on about the failures of Velib as if it were the end of Western Civilization. (Velib is the city's brand new, one-way, hourly bike rental program; see "Paris When it Fizzles" entry on our other blog, Cornichon.) When we pass a Velib "station" near the Arc de Triomphe, we triumphantly demonstrate that American credit cards won't work. Then Paris Pal swipes his Amex...the gates of Paradise swing open and a 3-speed bike is released from its stanchion. Blazer and shoulder bag into the bike's basket, and we're off in the mid-afternoon sun, no helmet (this would never fly in Seattle), down the bone-jarring cobblestones of the Champs Elysées, right at Le Fouquet's, past the George V and the American Cathedral down to the Place de l'Alma and across to the Left Bank, passing directly above the Princess Di crash site.

Some signs went up at the future site of the Colman Center earlier this week. Where there is currently a parking lot surrounded by Western Ave, the alleyway entrance to the Owl and Thistle, the pedestrian walkway to the ferry terminal and an on ramp to the Viaduct there will soon (2009) stand a 12-story office tower that's making the case that there is a market for "green" office space in Seattle. What's particularly environmentally friendly about an office building, apart from the whole consolidation of resources thing? According to the building's website: LEED certification, a green roof, reclaimed water irrigation, low-flow showers and toilets and a community bicycle fleet, among a few other more boring features. While some of those sound cool (particularly the bikes, although we imagine they will never get used) if you really want to do green building right--and in Seattle we really should--you should go all the way. How about using reclaimed water for those low-flow showers as well as irrigating the green roof? How about a carbon-neutral building? How about solar power?