For all the talk about whether or not the city's Master Bike Plan goes far enough, one thing is clear: if you spend any time on the city streets, there are new bike lanes and preferred bike routes out there. To help you keep track of all the changes, the Department of Traffic has released a new version of the bike map. If you ever ride your bike outside your neighborhood, you're going to......

Photo by Mike Siegel from the Seattle Times Seattlest Seth's cousin wasn't the only one stranded by the recent snow onslaught in our beloved Cascades. Anticipating the re-opening of I-90, we took Wednesday off from work and then bored a hole into our computer waiting for the DOT site to tell us the pass was finally open. 11am rolls around, our friends swing by to pick us up and we were off. The trip......

Photo by Cynthia ParkSeattlest's cousin is among the 75 people trapped in Diablo, a City-Light owned town in the North Cascades. There's no danger--they are in contact with the outside world and if they need supplies, City Light will helicopter some it. But they'll probably first finish what they've got. My cousin reports via the irrepressible Tubes:It is snowing heavily right now. Three more feet are anticipated over the next 3 days. DOT says the......

According to the Seattle Transit Blog, the University link of our not-sure-we-wanted-it-but-now-we-got-it--might-as-well-expand-it light rail system is getting the Federal funding it was looking for. It's headed to the President's desk with Seattle receiving the highest possible recommendation for funding from the Federal Transit Administration arm of the U.S. DOT. Screw you, Prop 1! Love you Patty Murray! Here's the Sound Transit release: The project connects the three largest urban centers in the region: downtown......

The PI is reporting that the Ballard Bridge is currently stuck open and that the DOT has no idea when it'll re-open. So if you're driving to Ballard this afternoon, you may want to take an alternate route. Or, better yet, don't drive anywhere near the Ship Canal this afternoon. You'll probably be better off. Seattlest will be spending this time not thinking about the monorail that could have been and how it would......

There was a lot of talk on the blogs last week about newly-released census data that highlighted the 23% of Washington residents that get to work by means other than riding in a car alone. Seattle is in the top ten US cities in walking to work, taking the bus to work and biking to work (although not in carpooling) all of which are impressive and encouraging. There is an element of spin to all......

You're at an intersection staring down traffic, trying to get someone to stop so you can get across. Suburu Honda, Honda, Suburu, that new Mustang, Prius, then someone with those damn studs on their tires that scrape the asphalt so loudly you can hear the road repair coin getting sucked out of DOT's wallet: Krkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkr. Of course this is the guy that stops. Mountain man, down at sea level to pick up a few tanks......

Holy crap are we not getting enough sleep. We woke up this morning and did battle with the dueling alarms we have to set to enforce our five hours of shut eye, slugged ourselves to the bus stop, inched our way downtown to the soothing sounds of Don Edwards and then experienced our first radical optical illusion since a beach rave and a handful of mushrooms five years ago. We peered into a newsbox and......

The state DOT today said that one of the two choices on the March special "what to do with the viaduct" election isn't safe, effectively rendering the election pointless.Seattle's proposal for a reduced, four-lane Alaskan Way tunnel should be dropped from further consideration, because of "serious operational and safety problems found during our technical review," the State Department of Transportation said in a letter released this morning. Here's the letter [pdf]. The DOT's issue is......

Recently Governor Gregoire's been taking a lot of heat for her ambivalent handling of the Viaduct sitchyation we got here. Today, the Seattle Times rides to her rescue. The blame-reallocating story by David Postman and Andrew Garber begins: Gov. Christine Gregoire got so frustrated trying to broker a compromise between Mayor Greg Nickels and House Speaker Frank Chopp on the Alaskan Way Viaduct that she turned to a Republican wise man for advice. "She......

This morning we saw a DOT truck cruising down 13th Avenue with a bed full of sand and its snowblade up. We can understand saving on sand, but saving on plow? Why not just plow everywhere you drive? On the bright side, it's a little easier to negotiate snowy sidewalks than icy ones. Here's the Seattle Times on the snowfall (closings and commute, ugly commute) and over here we have the P-I (closings and......

Seattlest's man on the ground in Juanita says the snow is already sticking, and the DOT wants you to skedaddle if you live north of 520...EVERYONE PANIC!!!!......

In the course of keeping regular business hours, Seattlest looked at pretty charts last night / this morning. This happened in between looking out into the back yard and hoping that none of the neighbors' 50-foot trees snapped and crushed our palacial estate. First courtesy of WS DOT, wind readings from the 520 bridge. We found them very encouraging.......

The Washington State DOT and KOMO (the traffic authority) are saying that unless you are an indispensable worker like a doctor or a 911 dispatcher or a field goal kicker, you oughta stay home. The roads in Seattle look pretty good--it's the outlying areas where the problems...uh...lie. The KOMO traffic guy reports "too many accidents to count." UPDATE: You know, the most amazing thing about last night is that we haven't seen any reports of......

The trains between Seattle and Tacoma are going to get faster over the next few years, at least in portions of South Tacoma. An improved track in that area has led Amtrak to new top speeds of 79 mph and other plans to ditch the scenic route that hugs the Sound will reduce conflicts with freight. From the News Tribune: Allowing up to 16 Amtrak trains per day through South Tacoma, Lakewood and DuPont is......

Those beknighted souls with web-enabled cell phones will now get places faster than everyone else, because the Washington State DOT has created small screen versions of their wildly popular real-time traffic maps. The larger real-time maps, launched in 1994, receive 400,000 daily page views. (Though state officials admit that much of this comes from people who've Googled "Seattle Traffic" in search of local reunion concerts of the seminal 1960's Steve Winwood-fronted band.) Until now they've......

The Viaduct is closing this weekend for a semi-annual inspection, which we like to imagine as Mayor Nickels walking up to and attempting to shake a support column. Thumbs-up, DOT, looks like we're set for another year or until such time as a replacement tunnel is funded! While the official inspecting is going on, there is an opportunity for some private citizen-types to get a close-up look at the Viaduct decks. The Alaskan Way......

The clock is ticking on Seattlest's monthly trip to the gas pump as that needle slips closer and closer to "E" (or "R" as Seattlest's car inexplicably calls it). We probably could have saved ourselves a few bucks by going last week, because local prices seem to be higher every time we look (which, when you fill up once a month, is not really that often). The current low price listed in the Seattle area......

Seattlest has let a day or two go by without yammering on about the Viaduct, and we're sorry. Luckily, there's new doings in the bass-ackwards transportation saga, reported in the Seattle Times: a bridge concept. Actually, Seattlest already came up with this idea months and months ago, after consuming a bottle of a "quaffable" Cotes du Rhone one evening and being thus reminded of the bridge they built over there that looks so appealing.......

If you've ever overheard your officemate on the phone saying, "Well, honey, it's black and red at the bridge but then it goes down to yellow," you know that a) they're on the DOT website, b) you're glad you don't live or work across the lake, and c) "honey" is screwed. (The image here shows 520 with "black" conditions on the left and "green" on the right.) The Washington Department of Transportation can't control the......

It's time for robot rap. Type any URL into this website and it will spit back some automated rhymes. We cooked up the Seattlest Rap, of course: HTTP in tha House (lyrics by: http://seattlest.com) made for thinking seattlest is responsible ore div id rightcolumn div class out seattlest crass us and involved the umpteenth time earlier this that the current they create weird art rocker a cheapie approximation of the class posted dah a......