Bicycle Face, Freeway Fights and Vehicular Cycling
Bicycle Face, Freeway Fights and Vehicular Cycling
New Seattle cycling history book, author interview part 1/2
This Sunday the Seattle Times will publish my Q&A with Tom Fucoloro, Seattle Bike Blog founder and author of the new cycling history of Seattle, “Biking Uphill in the Rain.” There was no way the fascinating interview could be covered in the word count available in the paper’s print edition. So here is a lot more of our discussion, intended to complement the Q&A.
Putting this together, it turns out this in-depth interview would turn into a huge, long post. Didn’t want to do that to readers, so I’m splitting it into two parts. Below we discuss the eras of Seattle cycling from the city’s beginning to the 1990s. Look for part 2 soon.
Pioneer Cycling
Q: You write that cycling was a popular activity for early city leaders, a list that “read like a collection of Seattle street signs.”
A: There were a lot of influential people in the city who really got into bicycling. There’s a couple Nickersons, a couple of Dennys. Judge Thomas Burke was really into bicycling, and he actually purchased the first-ever Seattle-made bicycle.
Q: What was “the bicycle face” that came from early bike racing in Seattle?
A: There was so much weird, sham medical advice of the era. Some doctors had written stories about medical conditions related to bicycling. One of them was the bicycle face, due to the effort, when your face is scrunched up from bicycling, that that would somehow cause permanent damage to your body.
Building Seattle’s Street Grid
Q: Besides paving two streets, the city began to build bike paths. How did the first bike paths you called “the little Oregon trails” become the city’s grand boulevards?
A: They were trying to figure out how do we get more bicycling into Seattle really quickly and they settled on this idea of building bike paths, across whatever land. A lot of the land was claimed by people [and] they build paths across private property.
A lot of people saw this as an opportunity to get people out to their land. Say you own a plot that’s out in the middle of the forest in, let’s say north Capitol Hill, absolutely in the middle of nowhere, and you really hope that people will start building homes on it as soon as possible. So you encourage and help fund the creation of a bike path through your land.
This coincided with a desire by the city engineer, RH Thompson, to build a boulevard network.
They built 20 miles of paths in a few years. [They became streets like] Interlaken Boulevard [and] Lake Washington Boulevard. The Lake Union bike path actually follows along the hillside between what is now the Capitol Hill and Cascadia neighborhoods, along a route that is now I-5.
Q: You dug into statistics and found some startling comparisons to today. What was the “100 Deathless Days” campaign?
A: The 1930s and 40s was the deadliest era of traffic in Seattle. We had a mix of fairly rudimentary roads, a huge influx of cars, and still a culture of city living where people were walking and crossing the street wherever they wanted. Cars had to somehow completely break peoples’ perspective of how they were allowed to behave in the streets in order to claim that space. In that process of changing that culture into which cars are the dominant mode…a lot of people died.
And in the face of this, the city recognized this problem. A staggering number of people died, including children, and they decided, well, we probably should better inform the public. It’s classic thing where you have this dangerous system but you don’t think changing the system is on the table, so you try to find some other way to get at your goal. That is not changing the system [if you] don’t address the thing that is actually dangerous. So you say maybe if we all try to be safer, that would work. So they had this 100 Deathless Days campaign. Newspapers were involved and were tracking it, had little scoreboards of how many days it had been since someone died and then they’d had stories of how someone died and we’d have to restart the counter. Like the workplace safety campaigns.
Q: They didn’t get very close, did they?
A: No, they never did. But we got as close as we ever did in 2011. Got into the 70s. But there’s never been a hundred days in a row when someone was not killed in Seattle streets.
Our Modern Cycling Era
Q: What were “Seattle’s bicycle dark ages?” What ended them?
A: I call it the dark ages because the bicycle became unnotable for a really long period of time once cars arrived. Bike shop business, which was booming up until 1905 or so, essentially transitioned and a lot of the first car dealerships were bike shops.
People were still biking. There were a couple of interesting moments, like the founding of UPS, which started as a bicycle messenger company. And there was a lot of bike racing, as a sport. And there were underground things that would happen. In the late teens early 20s there was a youth bicycling movement, they would host these big kid bike rides out to Green Lake or along Lake Washington. In the late 30s-early 40s there was a new group of people who got organized to take these big bike excursions out to youth hostels. This was when the youth hostel movement finally arrived in Seattle, again very late.
Q: When did the first city bike routes start to appear?
A: Harry Coe, who had been a hurdler in 1908 Olympics, but was an engineer, was part of the League of American Bicyclists. He developed a whole official plan for a citywide bike network. You can still see some of the old wood signs -- a pictograph of a bicycle, and it just says bike route. It doesn’t say where you’re going.
The Alki Trail [in West Seattle] was one of the city’s first ever bike lanes. Where they moved the parked cars over, which now we consider a cutting-edge, parking-protected bike lane. If only we would have kept going.
Q: Chapter 3, titled Freeway Fighting, is all about cars, not bikes. But how did fighting against the additional freeways being proposed (beyond I-5) eventually have an effect on bicycling?
A: Car culture through these years … had become so dominant that we were willing to bulldoze entire neighborhoods to put in a nice wide road that didn’t have any intersections. I wanted to track how people responded to this thing eventually becoming too big: the freeway revolt era. People saw what happened with I-5, an incredibly destructive, problem-ridden project that went way, way, way over budget, way over time. It was a complete disaster, honestly. There were landslides, people had to evacuate their homes, they had to put in these giant retaining walls they weren’t expecting to put in. And they destroyed whole parts of the city that people did not want to have leveled.
People didn’t get a whole lot of say. People got organized and decided to fight against them, particularly the RH Thompson Expressway, which would’ve followed roughly the path of Martin Luther King Way through the Central District to Montlake, straight through the Arboretum, then under the water and up through Ravenna. People got involved and organized huge protests against it.
They also were trying to stop I-90. They were going to plow straight through Mount Baker ridge and a neighborhood called Atlantic, which essentially doesn’t exist anymore, and a huge section of the International District, with a huge spaghetti interchange right in the middle of it and on the edge of Beacon Hill. Sam Smith Park, on the I-90 lid, that was not part of the plan. Instead it was going to be a huge interchange right on top of the Judkins Park neighborhood that would connect to the Thompson Expressway.
It would completely demolish this neighborhood, which at the time was almost entirely Black residents, a small plot of land where a lot of black owners were redlined into. And of course that’s where freeway planners thought was a great place to build a freeway… on top of a neighborhood that they thought of as blighted. For purposes of urban renewal, we needed to demolish these places. They didn’t think to ask people who lived there, of course.
People got organized in huge numbers and showed up at meetings…and killed the expressway. They were able to win things like the lid park and the shrinking of it. That was a big win, kept communities connected that were going to be divided. They were partial wins … but they did demonstrate that the spending spree must end.
Each generation found a different way to fit into what they were doing. Found a different way for bicycling to play a role. At the same time the freeway revolt happened, this new bicycling movement happened, and it’s no longer a part of car culture, it is its own movement. It’s now countercultural. That’s the place that I think it still fulfills.
Q: You critique Seattle’s transportation planning as being very car-centric. But at one point you say that “Seattle did something right” – opposing freeways – which prevented widening streets. Explain that? And what is “bottleneck theory”?
A: The long name for a freeway would be a limited access highway. Only certain city streets connect to the ramps that go onto the highway, which the highway department refers to as “collector streets.” Any time you have a street that connects to a highway ramp, that street now has to become wider. They make those streets wider and wider, and those streets are the ones that become most dangerous for people walking and biking. These streets are a de facto extension of the freeway.
I really want people to think about the cascading ramifications of building a freeway on a place. It’s the whole community around it that is affected.
You widen the streets because this is where people are backing up, but really every time you increase capacity on the street it just fills up. If you’re going to chase bottlenecks until they stop, you’ll eventually just pave the whole city.
When you make a street wider and it’s less comfortable to walk or bike, you’re essentially not just incentivizing but forcing people to drive cars. Induced demand is the term.
You can’t possibly widen your way out of this problem.
Q: “Vehicular cycling” was a key aspect of much early infrastructure planning. What is that?
A: It’s this idea that people can’t bike safely on existing streets unless they have the education to bike like any other vehicle. So a bicycle is a vehicle just like a car is a vehicle and they follow the same rules and they behave in the same way, and if everyone buys into this system, it’s safe and it works.
There’s a part of this that is true. But there’s only a very small percentage of people who are going to want to do that. Turns out riding a bike in a traffic lane with traffic at 45 miles per hour, that’s not fun. That’s not comfortable. You’re not breaking any rules, but that doesn’t mean it’s fun or safe to do. Doesn’t feel safe.
The problem is that this idea is very appealing to any political leader or traffic engineer who doesn’t really want to do the hard work of figuring out compromises to make a road for everyone. They’re used to making the whole road for cars, put in a crosswalk here or there, that’s just how roads were designed for the longest time. Squeezing in space for bicycling is inconvenient in that process, you might have to make compromises that are difficult. It’s way easier to say, well, we’re going to design this for vehicular cycling, which basically means we’re not going to do anything. We’ll fund some more education classes, fund a PSA campaign.
This split the advocacy community, which explains why we didn’t have much infrastructure built in the 1980s and 90s.
See the Seattle Times article for two of Tom’s upcoming book release events.
Interested in my cycling guidebooks? Learn about Biking Puget Sound and Cycling the Pacific Coast at my website.
Bill, great to read our interview with Tom and to highlight his book, which shares so many interesting stories about biking in the city. David