In response to Mayor Katie Wilson’s announcement expanding the Bicycle Weekends program to nearly every weekend from Memorial Day to Labor Day, Rainier Valley Safe Streets is now planning a bunch of new community bike rides and a new late summer street fair (name not yet determined) “with live music, food vendors, and more, one afternoon between Seafair and Labor Day.”
They also created a handy online form folks can use to quickly send happy letters to Mayor Wilson and District 2 Councilmember Eddie Lin supporting the expanded Bicycle Weekends schedule on Lake Washington Boulevard.
The group is seeking folks to help with their expanding summer plans. So if you have video or graphic design experience, enjoy event planning, want to help lead a group bike ride or simply have some time and energy to dedicate to helping however you can, fill out their volunteer form.
Not only does the Bicycle Weekends schedule include more dates than in previous years (with the exception of 2020-21, which was partly a response to the COVID shutdowns), but it is also the first summer since the opening of Judkins Park Station and the 2-Line connection to the eastside. Judkins Park Station exits directly onto the I-90 Trail, which folks can take through the bike tunnel, then onto Lake Washington Boulevard for a lovely ride through Colman Park to a spot very near the northern start of Bicycle Weekends at Mount Baker Beach. It’s not the closest light rail station to the event, but it’s a very fun way to get there and it connects to a lot more communities across the region. Merlin Rainwater and I recently led a MOHAI bicycle history ride along this route, and this section was a highlight. This is just one of the routes the group is seeking volunteers to support this summer:
All this comes as opponents of the mostly-car-free event, which started in 1968, are organizing against the plan. A sprawling and somewhat incoherent petition from the car-advocacy “Coexist Lake Washington” group makes a splattering of accusations about the “bike lobby” that is “well-funded, with paid employees actively working to restrict our access to this treasured stretch of public lakeshore.” Yes, the organizers in 1968 used the word “bicycle” in the name of the event, but the street is open to walking, biking, rolling a wheelchair, adaptive cycling, roller skating, and really anything that isn’t a motor vehicle. The event improves access to the waterfront by enabling people to enjoy it without a car, and not a single car parking space will be closed. The group even acknowledges in their petition that all the car parking areas will remain open during the event, yet they still insist that “working families who can only visit the lake on weekends” and “seniors and people with mobility challenges” will be “shut out” because “parking fills up quickly.” The parking is so inaccessible that it fills up quickly? The argument makes no sense. The only thing people can’t do is drive along the park boulevard because for these summer weekends that space will be reserved for park uses that cannot happen when the roadway is filled with cars. People can drive there all they want every other day of the year.
The petition also claims that this decision happened “without public engagement,” and I just do not have patience for such a transparently disingenuous accusation. They know perfectly well that the city spent years conducting public survey after public survey and even convened a task force to go through all of this because Coexist Lake Washington was part of it. They sat in those meetings and saw the results of surveys, such as the 2022 survey of 3,158 people that found wide support for “expand[ing] the program to additional weekends, holidays, seasons, etc.” Here’s the chart they were shown:
It’s true that Mayor Bruce Harrell backpedaled on Bicycle Weekends and even blocked some planned traffic calming on the street despite public survey results clearly favoring them. As at least one person knows all too well, those decisions were awful mistakes that in part helped make the case for a new mayor (I helped lead a bicycle rally during Bicycle Weekends for Wilson’s campaign, which she attended). It is perfectly reasonable to expect Mayor Wilson to make different decisions than her predecessor based on all this existing public outreach.
Anyway, rather than wasting any more energy being upset about this Coexist letter, go send Mayor Wilson and Councilmember Lin happy letters of support and then sign up to help build and celebrate community this summer. It’s gonna be a great time.