Title: Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from Behind the Handlebars

Author: Tom Fucoloro

Completed: Feb 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: I’ve been reading the Seattle Bike Blog for a while now and was excited when I heard Tom had a book coming out. This is a great tour through the history of biking in our city. It covers how much biking was happening in the early days of Seattle and how close we’ve come (several times) to building the infrastructure needed to make this a world-class city for those of us on two wheels. With more protected bike lanes getting installed this summer, Seattle is continuing to move in the right direction and the first chapter of the next book is already starting.

Highlights:

• Seattle hardly seems like a place for bike culture to flourish. How can anyone think that a bicycle is a good way to get around a city that has hamstring-straining 19 percent inclines in the heart of downtown? Biking from the downtown waterfront to the Seattle University campus just one mile east requires climbing as high as the tallest point in the entire state of Florida.2 And rain falls on that hill 152 days a year.3 Yet bicycling is a major part of Seattle’s past, present, and future.
• I practice independent advocacy journalism, meaning I follow the ethical standards of journalism while reporting with an openly stated assumption: more people biking safely is a good thing.
• Seattle’s relatively new traffic engineer was not a typical big-city engineer. Rather than threatening the Reasonably Polite Seattleites with arrest or admonishing them for doing something only professionals were allowed to do, he apologized. He didn’t want to remove the posts, but he had to because they weren’t up to code. Then he thanked them for challenging the way the department was building bike lanes, saying he would look into making the idea permanent. Finally, he kindly offered to return the posts if they wanted them back. The world was about to meet Dongho Chang:
• Sometimes when a new delivery of bicycles arrived by train, merchant Fred Merrill would make sure everyone in town knew about it. First came the sounds of trumpets and other horns from a marching brass band approaching from the south. Behind the band was a procession of twelve horse-drawn wagons containing 293 new bicycles fresh off the train.
• it opened up a recreational experience previously attainable only by those with the means to own a horse. Bicycles certainly weren’t cheap, but they were a lot more affordable to maintain and easier to store than a horse. So buying a “wheel,” as people often called bicycles then, opened up the growing population’s access to the forests and lakes on the outskirts of the developed city. The area was so forested and remote that even in 1901 people biking would sometimes encounter a bear.
• “The Argus believes that Mr. Cotterill would make a model mayor for a model city. He has decided opinions and force of character to back them up. But Seattle is not a model city. This paper does not believe that a very large percentage of the population desire to make it so.”
• from the University of Washington to Fremont and the then-independent city of Ballard, which had instituted its own bicycle license scheme to pay for its part of the path. The Ballard path was quirky. At one point, the terrain was too hilly to bypass some abandoned farm structures, so the path builders took the walls off an old farm shed and ran the path straight through it.
• In 1866, white leaders in Seattle—including many men whose names have been immortalized on street signs such as Terry, Denny, Stewart, Van Asselt, Horton, Maynard, Ballard, Holgate, and more—signed a letter opposing plans for the promised Duwamish reservation along the Black River south of Seattle in modern-day Renton, Tukwila, and Skyway. Their argument was that the reservation was “of little value to the Indians … whose interests and wants have always been justly and kindly protected by the settlers of the Black River country.”
• In an effort to raise public awareness about traffic deaths, the Seattle Traffic and Safety Council erected a towering “death thermometer” in 1940 at the intersection of Fourth and Westlake Avenues downtown,
• The thunder of military bands rang through the streets of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, playing proud patriotic music through the afternoon and into the evening before Independence Day 1900. As the evening grew late, several thousand people gathered near the band and started decorating and illuminating their bicycles. Illuminated bicycle parades had for years been one of the city’s favorite ways to celebrate,
• The short trip demonstrated the challenge facing more widespread adoption of cars in the city: There were not many roads suitable for driving one, and cars were even worse at navigating dirt roads rutted by horses and wagons than people on bicycles were. Early cars did not have the engine power to climb many of the city’s steep hills or the braking power to easily stop on the way down. “The hills of Seattle’s streets offer one comforting assurance to its people,” wrote the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1902, “no crank possessed by the speed mania will ever be able to operate a racing automobile here.”
• nineteen-year-old Jim Casey and his friend Claude Ryan put their bicycles to work starting in 1907, delivering messages and packages around the city.12 Ryan’s uncle invested a hundred dollars and gave them a free office in the basement of a saloon in Pioneer Square. Because biking was fast and Seattle was small, the messengers were efficient and their business grew. Soon the American Messenger Service had a team of people making deliveries by bike, foot, and streetcar. The company didn’t purchase its first automobile until 1913, a decision that set it on a different course. Six years later, they made the leap to doing business beyond Seattle when they bought the Motor Parcel Delivery Service and renamed their company the United Parcel Service, also known as UPS.
• Eighty-one years later, Seattle still has not gone one hundred days without a traffic death. The closest the city got was a seventy-six-day streak in the spring of 2017, but the city is getting closer. The four longest streaks were in 2017, 2018, and 2020.25 The 100 Deathless Days campaign in 1939 included public service announcements warning people to not be reckless,
• The first Seattle newspaper mention of the word jaywalking was in a 1912 Seattle Daily Times editorial suggesting the term would be effective at shaming people who “cut corners” by walking through the middle of an intersection.31 The editorial quotes a Cleveland News editorial at length, part of a trend across the country at the time to carve out more roadway rights for people driving cars. But originally, the term was based on a more common term: jay-driver. When cars first started arriving in cities, people didn’t know how to drive them. People who drove on the wrong side of the road or otherwise broke the normal ways of city streets would be called a jay-driver,
• This is an enduring black hole in the logic supporting car culture: the person controlling the fast-moving heavy vehicle is not responsible for the damage they cause so long as they were following the rules of the road when they caused the damage. Even if they are driving too fast to see someone walking in the dark, it’s not their fault unless they were significantly exceeding the speed limit or recklessly impaired. Then if the person driving is absolved of responsibility, no responsibility falls on the transportation agency or traffic engineer who designed the street or set the dangerous speed limit. It’s just nobody’s fault, so nothing changes.
• In Seattle, stories of people in cars injuring or killing kids on bikes remained common throughout the 1930s, and bicycle sales in the United States were as low as one bicycle per 500 people.43 (For context, US bike sales in 2015 were estimated at one bicycle per 19 people.
• When designing I-5 two decades later, engineers included eleven freeway crossings in the 2.5 miles of “desirable” neighborhoods north of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, but zero crossings for a nearly equal distance next to “hazardous” Beacon Hill. The consequences of this act of state-sponsored racism are still felt today. Freeway projects across the nation were often sold as “urban renewal” projects, and the displacement of lower-income communities of color was intentional.
• The effort to build a rapid transit system in the Seattle region kicked off around 1965 as one part of a package of civic investments known as Forward Thrust. The rapid transit system included a forty-seven-mile, thirty-station train system as well as a major expansion of bus transit service. The transit section of the plan was estimated to cost $1.15 billion, but the federal government was prepared to cover two-thirds of that.
• Berteig and a group of neighbors and advocates got together to promote a new vision for the railway that would make it the central artery of the city’s walking and biking network. And their history research gave them a name for their idea: the Burke-Gilman Trail. As bold and transformative as their idea was for Seattle, it would also reverberate throughout the country, inspiring and setting legal precedents for the national rails-to-trails movement.
• The idea of investing in transportation to enable housing development wasn’t inherently new to cars and highways. Many of the preautomobile streetcar lines in cities were created by private companies as a way to sell homes in developments beyond convenient walking distance from major city destinations and jobs. But streetcars still limited the extent of sprawl because they were costly to build and operate, giving developers a clear incentive to build dense neighborhoods around the streetcar lines to keep ridership high and land value at a premium.
• “I’ve been dragging my feet,” the BNR executive told Lagerwey, because he had worried that his superiors would dislike the deal with the city. There was just so much valuable land in the deal, and it all hinged on this document. “I’m retiring at 5:00,” he told Lagerwey. “So I’m going to sign this at 4:59, and then I’m walking out this door and we never have to talk again.” “I said, ‘That sounds good to me.’” Lagerwey laughed while telling me the story.
• Unlike a protest march that defies laws against walking down the middle of streets, it is legal to ride a bike on a public street because bikes are vehicles. Police have a long history of taking violent action against people marching in protests, often citing “obstruction of traffic” as a reason. Critical Mass, on the other hand, was both a First Amendment free speech action and also not inherently illegal. Running red lights is illegal and people corking intersections don’t have the authority to control traffic, but these actions are also in the interest of public safety. Is it really appropriate or a proper use of police resources to arrest people for taking actions to maintain safety?
• Seattle’s inequitable rollout of the relatively few bike facilities it had was a reflection of who had power within bicycle advocacy, and it painted a picture of who bicycle lanes were really intended to serve. The poorest people are the ones most likely to ride a bike, and it’s been that way for a long time. Bikes are cheaper to buy than cars and don’t require gas or even bus fare. But Seattle wasn’t building bike lanes for people who relied on biking; it was building bike lanes for people who were choosing to bike and had the time and resources to advocate for those bike lanes.
• a 2013 University of Washington study supported by Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and Bike Works measured the amount of time that traffic signals were programmed to provide for people walking across the street.37 They found that the walk signals gave people in the wealthier and whiter Ballard neighborhood in northwest Seattle five additional seconds to finish crossing the street compared to people crossing a comparable street in the lower-income and more diverse Columbia City neighborhood in Rainier Valley. Not only that, but Columbia City residents typically had to wait longer for the walk sign after arriving at the intersection. Racism was programmed into traffic signal computers. Though walk signal timing was far from the only traffic safety problem in Columbia City, the traffic injury rate was six times higher at the Columbia City location than at the one in Ballard.
• Sharrows don’t change any rules of the road. Instead, they are intended to remind people driving that people are allowed to bike on the street and that drivers should look out for them. It’s a passive-aggressive way of reminding people of the rules of the road, like an unsigned note left on a smelly office refrigerator. SDOT painted ninety-one miles of sharrows all over the city between 2007 and 2012. They were cheap, easy to install, highly visible, and uncontroversial. They quickly became a symbol of Seattle trying to look bike-friendly while not actually doing the hard work needed to achieve that goal.
• Cars are still allowed on a neighborhood greenway, but steps are taken to limit the number of people driving there. Ideally, only people accessing a home on the street should drive on a neighborhood greenway. Significant traffic calming efforts are added, such as speed humps, to slow the few cars using the routes so that the street becomes comfortable for people of all ages and abilities to use. The surest sign of a successful neighborhood greenway is seeing a group of neighborhood kids playing in the street.
• SDOT’s Stay Healthy Streets program was an immediate hit, and the city moved quickly to build twenty miles of them in 2020. At one point, expansion was briefly put on hold because SDOT had used every “road closed” sign it owned and needed to get more.
• Car travel on the already low-traffic residential streets decreased more than 90 percent in places, a sign that the program was working and that neighbors had embraced the concept. The number of people biking on these streets increased nearly 300 percent. As soon as the “road closed” signs went up, people started walking right down the middle of the street.
• Ten days after her death, Seattle demonstrated one part of the solution: a protected bike lane on Second Avenue through downtown and past the Garden of Remembrance. There was practically no opposition to the lane when it opened. People finally understood why we need bike lanes like it. Safe streets advocates were braced for another fight and ready to defend the new bike lane like they had fought to defend so many before, but nobody showed up on the other side of the battlefield. Because there is no War on Cars, and there never was. It was nothing more than an illusion, the belligerent bluster of people whose windshields obscured their views of what really matters in our world: the people we love.
• (they decried the “terrorism of the motorized minority”)
• The number of other people biking through downtown increased dramatically almost overnight, and riding a bike finally felt like a normal way to get around town. Biking became a reasonable option for many more people who would never have even tried biking on Second Avenue the way it was before. A place to be avoided at all costs became a destination.