Seattle Bike Blog

A halfway-competent operation management team would see that as a reason to make the hardware harder to repurpose, not easier. Big organized operations can figure shit out, but put some barriers in front of the script-kiddie/homeless-dude contingent. A me-too copycat startup like Spin who got kicked out of Seattle a year ago ( https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2022/05/13/city-announces-new-scooter-… ) doing it this way doesn't seem like a great endorsement to me. You have to spend $$$ up front on thousands of vehicles that cost hundreds of dollars each, and your marginal revenue per ride ain't great. Putting a dent in your vehicle theft rate becomes a big deal fast.

Can we also talk about the fact that the fastest growing EV market isn't for cars, its for e-bikes[1], and e-bikes are crazy efficient, and 20x-30x cheaper, compared to electric cars. Example, an e-bike with 400wh ~5 charges of a laptop battery, can get 30 miles of range, compared to ~250wh/mi of a car[2]. Cities are slowly waking up to the fact that more people are biking, and more biking infrastructure leads to even more people biking. I'm not trying to say that the problem highlighted here isn't valid, I'm merely trying to highlight that the scale of the problem might be lower than we expect. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21016306/electric-bike-ebike-sales… [2]: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2023/04/12/why-an-e-bike-incentive-pro…

He apologized and recanted: http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2013/03/04/rep-orcutt-says-bicycle-carb…

I am sympathetic to the concern here. But you would do a much better task by attacking the stats, not by blanket dismissal of the ideas. Following a few links from the main article easily gets to https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2017/09/01/missing-the-forest-for-the-… which has https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/13/wapo-is-wrong-head-injuries-are… and ultimately points to there being something with just getting more folks on bikes. Especially for short trips that are likely the norm for bike share systems. There is some intuitive sense to this. Is why short bus rides don't require seatbelts. (Though, I confess I can't remember the rules for cross state busses. https://www.cga.ct.gov/2016/rpt/2016-R-0318.htm has some info on school busses, but I'm not entirely clear that is applicable here. Except in as much as it is clear that comparing helmet laws to seatbelt ones is... dubious.) Again, if you have legit complaints, make them. If you feel safer wearing safety gear at a personal level, you are correct. If you think that safety gear at a society level is a no brainer, I challenge you on that assertion.

"one study suggests that helmet use may reduce the risk of head injury by 83%" That one study has been thoroughly debunked...yet decades later it still gets cited. https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2013/06/04/feds-no-longer-back-1989-se…

There was at least one bike death last year (https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2025/12/14/person-biking-on-beacon-hil… at least one this year (https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2026/02/woman-hit-and-killed-crossi… but it looks like 2024 might have been a year with no bicycle related fatalities.

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An EIS can be useful cudgels to impede construction. In Seattle, one portion of a very controversial multi-use trail had an EIS that took "more than three years at a cost of $2 million. That’s less than 7 feet of trail studied per day at a cost of $271 per foot. And that doesn’t include any construction." [1] And that's from 2015, and the trail still isn't completed (lawsuits are still ongoing). 1: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2015/06/19/18-missing-link-victims-wil…

This was from 2013. Here is a recent blog post about a street redesign on a busy road in Seattle that was very successful in preventing accidents. https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2020/09/17/report-ne-65th-street-bike-… Driving on this road before the redesign was very strange -- it was essentially two-lane but without stripes and no explicit bike lane. Since the redesign, the turn lanes, bus stops, and bike lanes are clearly marked and it has lead to a significant decrease in accidents.

> We were pretty much shocked because we naively thought that in such a beautiful and clean country everybody is running / biking all the time. Surprisingly, NZ is not a good place for cycling. A guy and his wife[0] did a world cycling tour a while back and Wellington is the only place where he had serious issues with the locals[1]. [0]: http://www.pathlesspedaled.com/ [1]: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2012/01/12/russ-from-path-less-pedaled…

Just yesterday this happened in Seattle: http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2013/07/08/west-seattle-greenways-co-fo…

> That is situation-dependant. So let's do it where it makes sense > I have seen slow bikes cause backups on roads. Build bike lanes. > I've also seen heavily-used bridge lanes turned into empty bike lanes. Why didn't bikers feel safe on these lanes? Why weren't they used, or are they used, you just don't see it because you aren't looking during the right hours? > Even when fully used, the carrying capacity (people moved / time) of a bike lane can be far less than a lane dedicated to buses or even cars. (It depends on slope and traffic speed.) I've never been in a bike traffic jam, but I've been in more than my fair share of car traffic jams in high density areas. This is because cars take up more space per person than bikes, bikes are a very viable alternative to single person random access transport over short to medium distances while busses are not if the routes don't line up well. Obviously, for traveling 50 miles, there isn't a substitute for a car, but the point of this is to make urban areas bike and pedestrian friendly for the people that live in those areas, not necessarily to make it easier to drive through them. http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2nd-Ave-Gif-…