The Seattle Bicycle Master Plan has been a huge success by many measures. First, it had funding. Most bicycle master plans are written and sit on a shelf gathering dust without funding for decades until they are woefully out of date. The Seattle Bicycle Master Plan had some initial, limited, funding for the quick, cheap blast of sharrows and bike lanes. It hasn’t gotten the second round of larger funding for expensive projects like pedestrian and bicycle bridges, more multi-use trails, and fixing nightmares like the Ballard Bridge.

It has also been an absolute failure by some measures too. We’ve put sharrows, which supposedly indicate the safest lane position to bicycle, over lateral cracks and concrete pad seams which are one of the most dangerous surface defects possible for a cyclist. We have community groups that are clammoring for bicycle improvements that go far beyond what the Bicycle Master Plan calls for, and even that the plan rejects as the Seattle Bike Blog discusses.

Perhaps one of the biggest flaws in the Bicycle Master Plan is that it doesn’t call for before and after studies of all of the new experimental facilities. We now have sharrows, green lanes, buffered bike lanes, and we will likely have cycletracks. These are all very new to Seattle and pretty new to the United States and while the last thing we want to do is see good projects get stuck in a committee and be debated to death, we should carefully measure the effectiveness and the document the design decisions because we are becoming a template for other cities to follow. With anything new, we are going to miss details and make mistakes. If we don’t outlaw a free right turn on a red light, will right turning cars frequently hit cycletrack users? If the cycletrack doesn’t have clear signage, will it be more hazardous than a bike lane? If we don’t document and measure, how will we know?

Rumor has it that there was a preliminary study of sharrows on Stone Way that got nixxed by SDOT. It said that sharrows on an uphill slope were not effective. That is really important data for other communities to have when they think about deploying sharrows.

So, what now? We are about to start thinking of a major update to the Bicycle Master Plan. What should be included in the new Bicycle Master Plan?

1. Dedicated funding. Without funding, a plan is just a pile of paper. This time, we need to fund the big projects too.
2. Go beyond bicycles. Calm traffic. Reduce the residential speed limit to 20 mph. Cap arterials at 35 mph.
3. Eliminate the free right on red where bicycle facilities are present.
4. Go beyond SDOT. Look at bicycle culture. Bring in the Parks Department and work with events like the Seattle Bicycle Music Festival.  Encourage the large number of varried bicycle groups in Seattle to create an annual Bike-a-palooza type festival for Seattle.
5. Go beyond engineering. Along some of our multi-use-trails we have fun art installations. With the influx of new cyclists, we need education and enforcement. The new Bicycle Master Plan could encourage expansion of public art, add bicycle safety education to the Park Rangers services, add enforcement of laws like stopping at stop lights and helmet usage.
6. Continue to expand the toolset of SDOT, but with before and after effectiveness, safety, and public perception studies of new experimental facilities.  Allow cycletracks and anything else we can imagine, but study the before and after situations and save some money to go back and fix the mistakes that we are bound to make as we try new things.
7. Expand the role of the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board to also connect with social justice and environmental groups across the city.  Currently, the wealthy neighborhoods like Ballard have good bicycle facilities and lots of bike racks and the poorer neighborhoods have minimal bicycle facilities and few bike racks.  We need to look beyond the current cycling population and see the unmet needs in other neighborhoods.
8. Make pavement quality on bicycle routes a priority.  When SDOT last told the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board about non-arterial pavement quality, they said that out of the 2000 lane miles of non-arterial streets, SDOT has budget to replace 1 lane mile per year.  Typically, asphalt roads have a 25 year lifespan and cement roads have up to a 75 year lifespan.