Dori: Bike zealots want to bring Seattle’s traffic problems to Bellevue

I have some new information for all my listeners on the Eastside. Are they going to try to do to Bellevue what they did to Seattle?

Bellevue is pretty crowded with traffic as it is. Trying to get in and out of Bellevue Square is a nightmare at rush hour, especially at Christmastime when Snowflake Lane is going on. They need car mobility in Bellevue. It’s nowhere near as bad as in neighboring Seattle, though.

But apparently, a Seattle group is trying to greatly influence Bellevue to take away car lanes from Main Street so bike lanes can be added. They have identified 25 bicycle trips per day on that street, as the Washington Policy Center reported.

Can you imagine taking away a car lane for those 25 trips? I know the line they always use is, “Well, there would be more bike commuters if we had the infrastructure.” Come on.

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Bellevue, you are killing it right now. You are stealing away Amazon. You have done a great job keeping the homelessness and drug problem out of your city. You still have relative mobility compared to Seattle. The main reason companies want to leave Seattle is because of the crime, the tents, and the gridlock. Do not let these liberal Seattle groups influence the engineering of the streets in Bellevue.

Look, I commute most days by bicycle. I love the Burke-Gilman Trail. But I also recognize that bicycle trips are only a tiny part of how Bellevue workers commute. Surveys show that less than one percent — a half of a percent, actually — of commuters there use their bicycles to get to and from work. Why would you take lanes away from cars to serve a half-percent of commuters?

It is a zealotry that has no connection to common sense.

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