Seattle is No. 1 for this bike lane
Dec 21, 2016, 8:36 AM | Updated: 8:49 am
Seattle has hit the top of the charts — of bike lanes that is.
In case you missed the — obviously — highly anticipated list of the top 10 best bike lanes in America, Seattle is the no. 1 city with the best bike lane in the United States. Bicycling advocacy group People For Bikes ranked Seattle’s Westlake protected bike lane as the best in the nation.
Related: Why Seattle will plow bike lanes after a snow storm
People For Bikes recently posted:
The country’s best new bike lane of 2016 is a stripe of asphalt evidence that Seattle is willing to explain, over and over again, why a parallel route two blocks away sometimes isn’t good enough.
…they soldiered through years of negotiations and lawsuit threats to finish Westlake, finding a design that preserved 90 percent of the spaces in a relevant public parking lot. The turning point: Mayor Ed Murray called all parties into a room and forced them to hear one another out.
What they got was a world-class bikeway: the first flat, intuitive link joining downtown Seattle to the north side and a vast regional trail network.
Westlake bike lanes
The Westlake protected bike lanes connect the north end of Seattle at the Fremont Bridge to South Lake Union. It’s a highway for bikes only and is separate from the nearby roadways for cars.
The bike lane received criticism from some, and part of it even garnered a lawsuit threat by a local yacht club. Even after it opened in September 2016, the bike lane got a little tacky with riders — in that someone threw sharp tacks on the bike lane.
According to the Seattle Department of Transportation, bike ridership in Westlake has doubled in the three months the bike lane has been open.
As for the other cities on the list, in order from highest to lowest (after Seattle): Chicago; Tallahassee; Aurora; New York City; Oakland; Washington D.C.; Minneapolis; Baltimore; and Tampa.
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