Dollar Bikes, A Visionary Engineer and Stay Healthy Streets
Biking Uphill in the Rain author interview, part 2/2
This article continues my Q&A with Tom Fucoloro, author of the new cycling history of Seattle, “Biking Uphill in the Rain,” which is designed to accompany our interview recently published in The Seattle Times. In this second half, we delve into Seattle cycling’s recent history, current situation and future prospects.
Q: Early trail advocates fought against freeway expansion, but there was also a movement for new bike infrastructure, like the Burke-Gilman Trail. That really began the process of creating a bicycle network, didn’t it?
A: The Burke-Gilman Trail is an example of the movement creating something brand new out of nothing, creating a new idea, building support for it, and getting it to be real. Turns out you can build a movement that is anti-freeway, but it’s way more difficult to build a movement that is in favor of something new.
They organized what they called a “walk in.” huge groups of people started in Kenmore, another started at the University of Washington, and they met at Mathews Beach. They just walked along the rail line to show their support for having this, what they called the hiking and biking trail. Had a lot of city and state politicians come to show their support. There were counter-protesters. Some wanted to run a tourist train along this route.
Q: First the city got Neighborhood Greenways, but then Stay Healthy Streets grew out of greenways during the pandemic. I enjoyed the factoid that the city had to briefly stop setting up those streets because they ran out of road closed signs! What is different in the Stay Healthy Streets that adds to our bicycle infrastructure?
A: The improvements that we’re making to these routes were not just for bicycling. It’s a walking and biking thing. It’s both a part of the bike network but also a series of pedestrian safety improvements. Stay Healthy Streets just really more solidifies that. They’re essentially saying that you should only be driving here if you are accessing a driveway—literally going to a property on this street. To the extent that they’re actually encouraging people to walk in the middle of the street. That’s how you know it’s working, that people are actually out walking in the middle of the street. You know you have a success on your hands.
Q: Yes, I’ve seen that. Sometimes on my bike I’m seeing more people on the street rather than the sidewalks.
A: They also prioritized this strategy on the many, many streets that don’t have sidewalks. Because people are going to be walking in the streets. Unfortunately, they made a decision to make a whole bunch of neighborhoods without sidewalks and now it’s really expensive to go back and add it back in.
Q: Along with the successes there have still been a lot of crashes and deaths on our streets. You tell a very moving story about being at the Road Safety Summit when a survey was asked of the audience and every hand went up. What was the question, and how did that change things?
A: The question was, raise your hand if you or a loved one had been seriously injured or killed in a traffic collision. Nearly every hand went up, and you looked around the room and there was a collective gasp. It was a very powerful experience.
We’re taught that these are all accidents and when something goes wrong it’s like an act of God that can’t be explained, and your friend or brother was just unlucky that day. But then when you look around and you see how many people are in the same boat as you and … that this is systemic. Apparently we’re all unlucky. Which begs the question, maybe this isn’t working.
Also, it helps to humanize everyone you’re in the room with, but also everyone in the world. You realize that all of them know people who’ve been in wrecks. The assumption is not that it hasn’t happened to them and that’s why they’re acting this way….
It helps you to have the courage to say no, this is not acceptable anymore. This is not the cost of living in this society. We can do better than this. We have to do better than this. We don’t have a choice, it’s our moral imperative to not let this go on forever.
Ironically [that period] was a relatively safe time. But there had been this chorus from certain conservative media outlets in the city about a war on cars. “Seattle’s waging this war on cars and that’s why they’re building these bike lanes and charging for parking.” There was animosity coming out, conflict. Then the series of deaths happened and people learned more about who died.
Q: Mike Wang. Brandon Blake. Sher Kung, and others. It felt like a “Say Their Name” situation for Seattle’s cycling community. What was our turning point there? What happens when we honor these people?
A: It just humanizes everyone. It’s kind of hard to be aggressive and angry at someone if you realize they’re someone’s dad or sister. Everyone is just a human being going through life.
As more people bike, more people know someone who’s biking. It demystifies who it is that’s biking. It’s harder to dehumanize someone on a bike if you have a direct connection to someone who does that.
Seattle moved through that process pretty dramatically in the teens. It was a pretty profound shift and we came out of it with a much more clear goal: that we need to make bike lanes. It’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity. Safe streets is a mission, it’s not just a nice-to-have.
As a culture, it’s all part of the shift from bicycling being a weird activity to being mainstream. It’s made vast strides in in that direction.
In the safe streets advocacy movement as a whole in Seattle, biking has recently been at the forefront…. I keep waiting for there to be a car equivalent of it. If someone dies in a freeway wreck, where’s the outrage? That’s a person! Now it happens with cycling. The same thing doesn’t happen with driving, and I think it should.
Q: What triggered the evolution to bike sharing?
A: Seattle was very late to get into it. In some ways they came in at this really awkward moment.
They tried to build this old school system, called Pronto, and they just absolutely biffed it. They never put enough stations in that it would pay for itself. It wasn’t even the [entire] first phase, it was phase 1A, they never even got to 1B. The expansion plan was put on hold and then killed. It was a complete disaster. Frustrating to report on it. It worked pretty well, but there just wasn’t enough of it.
King County Metro was one of the first agencies to put bike racks on buses. Bike share was seen as a solution to bringing your bike on transit.
And right out of the ashes of this horrible defeat… was the dockless bike share model.
Q: How did bike share eventually become a sustainable model (or has it)?
A: This new model would be entirely privately funded. You could leave them wherever you wanted. Seattle had been late to get bikeshare and when we got rid of Pronto we were one of the few cities of our size that did not have bikeshare.
These companies had gotten into the venture capital world and this bike-sharing business was like a potential unicorn business. These companies would return 100X, or whatever. By offering $1 bike rides. From my perspective as a bike advocate, it’s their money. If they want to bring a bunch of bikes and offer $1 rides I’m all for that. Within months of Pronto shutting down, Seattle was permitting these dockless bikeshare companies. They just brought as many bikes as they could be permitted for.
But there were some serious issues with the business model. Multiple companies pursuing this strategy and you ended up with mountains of abandoned bicycles. The overwhelm really started to take hold and the main companies, which were based in China, really started to collapse. It will end up in business textbooks right next to tulips.
We had a really exciting couple of years of $1 bikes and the number of people biking in Seattle exploded. Eventually, it turns out that selling bike rides for a dollar is not a great business model. Eventually the pedal-only dollar bikes died out in favor of more expensive charge-by-the-minute ebikes, and those we still have today.
Lime…seems to be settling into something that is sustainable, but it’s not there yet.
When dollar bikes first arrived, bike trips on the Fremont Bridge went way up. Then you had this crash where the bikes were going away and you only had scooters, but when that happened, the bike trips didn’t go down. So people had ridden these bikes and it had gotten them to ride, so they went out and bought their own bikes, I guess, because the trips stayed way up high even with the dollar bikes gone.
Q: Scooters came along shortly after ebikes. What happens next in the bike share world?
A: It’s always such a chaotic market. Scooters have seen a big decline. I think that ebikes are used at a lower rate but they’re more reliable. But also, part of the scooter thing turned out to be a little bit of a fad. Ebikes are still novel to people, but not biking itself.
There’ve definitely been times when it felt like bikes were doomed, but bikes always find a way through. I’d never bet against biking.
Q: Former SDOT Traffic Engineer Dongho Chang told you that he’d heard from citizens that it was “great that we have all these bicycle lanes everywhere, but that’s not for me. I wouldn’t use it. Or ‘a child wouldn’t use it.’” What did he then with that knowledge that advanced what we have today?
A: He was a rather unique engineer, has always really been grounded in the human reality of how the infrastructure works. He never took his eye off of that, which is really cool. And he also didn’t have a huge ego, so if something’s not working he’s not going to sit there and defend it, he would look for why it’s not working.
He went out on a mission to experiment in Seattle [with] how we can make protected bike lanes that have actual separation, both through the middle of the block but also at the intersections, with bicycle signals separated from turn signals, things like that. These infrastructure tools. How can we make Seattle examples of that so they can become the new standard? He really advanced the toolset that SDOT can use.
Seattle accomplished really impressive things because of that. He was successful in translating peoples’ real-life experiences into traffic engineering terms, documents and all the tech stuff required to make those things happen.
Q: In 2015 the Move Seattle levy was proposed to Seattle voters. It asked for $930 million over nine years, three times the size of the expiring levy. You call it “the biggest test of Seattle’s changing transportation culture.” Only one year left on that levy period. How has it worked out?
A: Depends how you measured it. They did not fulfill the mileage goals that were stated in the initial plan. But the city is night and day compared to then. It funded the bike master plan work that we now have.
You can bike from the Fremont Bridge to the International District without leaving a protected bike lane. That was unimaginable back in 2015. Absolute pipe dream. And not only that, you have two options in how you can do it. It’s actually like a transportation network.
There’s huge gaps in it, of course, but man, we’ve come so far. A lot of people haven’t really been downtown since the pandemic started and they might be shocked. lf you bike downtown and you haven’t biked in years, you’re going to be amazed how much better it is.
We’ve come a long way, and those investments did a lot of good.
It’s demonstrated that the strategy is effective. If you build protected bike lanes that people feel more comfortable biking on and more people will bike on them. It works. And they have a very good safety record.
Q: At the end of the book you write that “It’s so much easier to stop something than to create something.” What’s the next creation needed to keep us moving on our bikes?
A: I think the next step is to take another leap, a leap of faith, and we have to believe in ourselves. The whole time we’ve been saying “Vision Zero,” our vision is zero fatalities by 2030. That was the stated goal. Every single time we make a street safer and we do a safe street project it works. Every single time. And it works amazingly. We need to have faith in ourselves.
I think what the city should do is say that we’re going to do it. It’s a moon shot. We’re going to make every single dangerous street safe. The Department of Transportation has done some really smart work around data analysis in the safety assessment program. They looked at all the fatal incidents on Seattle streets … and have gone and extrapolated that out to say, where else in the city does the same design exist? And wherever that condition exists, we can use these tools to get ahead of collisions to stop them before they happen and turn into tragedies. …I would love to see the city commit and say we’re going to have zero dangerous streets by the end of this levy. We’re going to do a safety project on every single street that has a high crash rate.
As a city we have the resources to do it. Believe in yourselves, we can do this! Imagine if Seattle can be the first city to get to zero traffic deaths in an entire year! We can do it, we’re not that far off. Not that long ago we had years where we had 15 deaths. For a U.S. city of our size, it’s very small. We can get there.
Q: You write about advocating for a better world through bicycling. What does that mean to you?
A: I imagine a world where we don’t need bicycle advocacy, because bicycling is just normalized and our city is so committed to safe streets that we’re going to make those streets safe for bicycling too, so you don’t need to spell out each mode that we need to make safe. Then we can have a larger tent safety movement. It should include people driving too.
Q: Your project with the bike blog has been journalism with bicycle advocacy. What does that mean for you and your work?
A: Work myself out of a job.
Q: What are you most excited about with the future of cycling in Seattle?
A: We’re about to get a bunch of new leaders. I want people to feel empowered that they can just take the reins of whatever the next part of bicycle advocacy looks like, and just make it their own.
We’ve accomplished a lot as a movement to normalize the inclusion of bicycling in the daily works of the city. For a while it was like a huge seemingly impossible goal.
The next phase of bicycle advocacy might not refer to itself as bicycle advocacy, but could be using bicycles for other things, but also using bicycles to be safer. It doesn’t have to just be about biking, and maybe it shouldn’t just be about biking. Whatever the next thing is, will inevitably be a larger tent idea.
Anyone out there with energy to start doing events or organizing people and you have an idea of how bicycling fits in with whatever your vision is, go for it. This is the moment. A really cool moment. A shift happening, a lot of new energy that hasn’t fully absorbed into the biking structures that exist.
I’m already seeing people coming in and complaining about stuff that we considered huge successes 10 years ago, complaining about the inadequacies of this or that design. Part of me bristles because I’m war-torn over winning it, but they’re right, they’re allowed to have their point. Push things forward. I’ll assist. Try to get the word out.
Tom will discuss his book tomorrow night, Wednesday, Oct. 18, at 6 p.m. at Cascade Bicycle Club, 7787 62nd Ave. N.E. in Seattle. https://cascade.org/node/82295