Today we’re starting a new series on bicycle infrastructure, or what Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) calls bicycle facilities. The City encourages bicycles for transportation and has been implementing various signage and street striping to increase safety. These things appear, but there is not much education about what they mean and how to use them. This series will explain the usage of all the types of bicycle facilities, as well as go over some laws pertaining to bicycles and the responsibilities of drivers of vehicles around bicyclists.
In 2007 Seattle’s Bicycle Master Plan was adopted to attempt to build as many bike facilities as possible quickly and with low cost using Bridging the Gap money. The limited funding resulted in mostly street painting, such as sharrows (we’ll cover these later). The Master Plan project is about half complete now. SDOT has learned a lot from observing the results and getting comments about what has been done to-date. SDOT believes that what’s in place now works for superuser cyclists, but that casual cyclists are still uncomfortable riding in traffic and don’t feel safe. Now the focus of the project is on connecting neighborhoods for casual cyclists and pedestrians.
Meanwhile, best practices for bicycle facilities, safety, and design keep evolving in the U.S. and around the world (such as greenways and cycle tracks – we’ll explain these later), so Seattle has drafted a 2013 Bicycle Master Plan.
For the most part, each post will cover one type of bike facility. The next post will be on sharrows since we see a lot of those bike images painted on the streets around here.
Looking forward to more!