The Council Transportation Committee meeting for June will be next week on Wednesday June 4th at 5pm at City Hall Northwest. The agenda is up on the city’s webpage. Here are the items on the list:

• AB 5841 Development of Position Statement for Safety Improvements to Issaquah-Hobart Road
• AB 5837 Letter of Support to Sound Transit
• AB 5842 ITS Bond Measure
• AB 5844 Evaluation and Determination of ‘A’ List Projects for Concurrency
• Proposed Accomplishments for the Maple Street Study

I plan to go and would encourage any other interested folks to attend.

Bob Miller has come up with a bike ride that visits many of the bridges in Issaquah. He’ll be leading the ride next Thursday, June 5th starting at the Community Center at 7pm. This is an easy ride of approximately 10 miles at a leisurely pace.

The ride is organized through the Cascade Bike Club and there is more info about it here.

Come out and meet fellow GAIT members and be a bicycling presence on the streets of Issaquah. If you’re still nervous about riding on the street this is a great way to get some practice with some more experienced riders.

If you have questions leave a comment or send email and we’ll get Bob to give us answers.

Last Wednesday nine of us (Becky, Paul, Ed, Erik, Bob, David, Barb, Karen, and Jeff) met in the quiet and comfortable clinic room at the back of REI.

I put our mission statement up on the wall:

GAIT’s mission is to promote and enable walking, bicycling and bus riding as practical and fun ways to get around Issaquah.

And we talked about ways our little shoestring non-profit can achieve that mission. Here’s the list of things we came up with:

• Offer a class on how to use a bike for errands around town
• Be visible walkers, bikers, and bus riders
• Wear GAIT-branded leg bands when cycling
• Start some organized rides on the lesser-known corridors in town
• Take city council members and city staff on rides/walks
• Identify problem areas to city
• File Citizen Action Requests
• Follow development projects through the process tracking ped/bike/bus impacts
• Communicate to local businesses to promote ped/bike/bus to employees
• Ped/bike/bus passports (get stamps at various Issaquah locations)
• Work with Chamber of Commerce
• Get Cascade Bike Club to do some of their bike training sessions here
• Sponsor a Car-free/car-lite shopping day
• Make GAIT stickers so members are visible
• Map local ped/bike/bus amenities (trails, bike racks, toilets, benches, sidewalks, etc.)
• Create bike rack standards and sources to help interested parties do them right
• Promote bike racks to businesses
• Tabling at community events
• Work with police on bike enforcement
• Ped/Bike/Bus tips in Issaquah Press
• Work with service clubs
• Lobby for completion of missing links (e.g., sunset->high point)
• Colorized bike lanes/bike boxes
• Bus routes up the hills on Squak, Cougar, and plateau
• Designated “bike buddy” to help with trip planning
• Trip partners to help new users on their first ped/bike/bus trips
• Salmon Days Parade
• Catchy slogans (e.g., $0.00/gallon)
• Loaner bikes
• Bike maintenance collective
• Ped/bike accident tracking and investigations
• Bike theft tracking, investigation, and stings
• Park and walk promotion (combine trips)
• Find out when the right time is to make sure ped/bike/bus amenities are included in development projects
• Form a city website monitoring team to identify new developments
• Alert membership at pivot points so they can contact council/staff
• Monitor transportation committee
• Monitor land use committee
• Cooperative effort with bike shops (e.g., maintenance classes)
• School bus bike racks
• Sponsor school bike clubs
• Get metro/sound transit to give us free ride tickets to give out
• Highlight time/cost savings for ped/bike/bus
• Help people over their first efforts at using ped/bike/bus modes
• Help people with gear selection for ped/bike

Then in the last few minutes of the meeting we talked about how it would be valuable to have some measurements that we could track over time to show how ped/bike/bus utilization is improving. We came up with the following thoughts about measurement

• Bike lane traffic monitors
• Work with the Commute Trip Reduction program and help businesses make their targets
• Do a survey
• Check what Portland is measuring
• Measure bike/ped/bus traffic at specific locations over time
• Grab results from recent East Lake Sammamish Trail survey
• Measure miles of trail/sidewalk/bike lanes
• Measure number and distribution of benches, picnic tables, etc.
• Find out why people are using ped/bike/bus modes
• Measure time taken between different destinations

The folks at the meeting were predominantly bicycle fans so a lot of this stuff skews that way (though if you squint at it right, most of it applies to all three modes). If you have ideas about how GAIT can promote and/or enable walking and bus riding leave a comment.

Next month we’ll work on narrowing down the list into a set of goals and objectives.

Our next meeting will be 7pm Wednesday May 21st in the clinic room at the REI store on Gilman Blvd by Safeway. The room is on the right at the back of the store.

Hope to see you there.

I guess we should point out that May is Bike to Work Month. If you have been thinking about trying to commute to work by bike it’s a great time to get some help over the initial challenges. The full calendar of events is at Cascade Bike Club.

May 16th is Bike to Work Day. Stop by the City’s booth at West Lake Sammamish Parkway and SR-900 from 6am to 10am.

After we talked about Citizen Action Requests at our last meeting, member John wrote one up about the excessive speed of drivers on NW Juniper Street.

Two days later a temporary radar speed sign was placed at the problem area. How’s that for fast action? John speculates that there had been many other complaints about this street, so maybe the sign was already in the works before his CAR, but it’s still pretty cool that the city is responding to this need.

Let us know if you make use of the CAR process to address a ped/bike/bus transportation issue.

Here’s an event close by that will extend bicycle transportation to our neighbors in Africa.

The ARAS Bikes for Africa Project

YOUR USED BICYCLE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN AFRICA!

In Ghana, an impoverished country, the main form of transportation is walking – lucky ones ride a bike to work, school and the market.

Please consider donating your bike to ARAS, a local non-profit foundation that is supporting the African Bike Project.

All bikes accepted, regardless of their condition or size (no tricycles).

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED!

BIKE DROP OFF:

Saturday, May 17th 9am-1pm

Sammamish City Hall 801 228th Ave SE

For more information: Mary Trask 425 868-8448

Unfortunately I can’t make it to this, but maybe you can:

Livable Copenhagen: The Design of a Bicycle City
May 9, 12 – 1:15 p.m.
University of Washington, Gould Hall, Room 435

Cycling is on the rise in Pacific Northwest cities, yet in Copenhagen, Denmark, more than a third of all commuters get to work on a bike. Alyse Nelson studied bicycle planning during the fall of 2006 and winter of 2007 to try to learn how the Danes created such a bicycle-friendly city. Her presentation will make the case for bicycle cities, present planning principles that make the bicycle a prevalent mode of transportation in Copenhagen, and provide details on how the bicycle fits on the street and in the city. The presentation will end with conclusions learned from Copenhagen and time for a broader dialogue with the audience.

(Lifted from the Cascade Bicycle Club “Braking News” email newsletter.)

Report back if you go!

Edited to add: If, like me you can’t make it to the lecture you can still read the paper this talk is based on:  Livable Copenhagen: The Design of a Bicycle City

We had 10 people at the Issaquah Brewhouse on Wednesday night for our meeting: John, Lisa, Don, Barb, Bob, Mary, Erik, Jeff, Becky, and Bev.

We checked in with folks who agreed to do stuff at our last meeting:

• Jeff reported on progress on this year’s Complete Streets projects. We talked about the proposal to restripe SE 43rd Way. There was some frustration that relatively little money is being allocated to bike lanes even though we’re happy that the plans include many new sidewalks.
• Jeff didn’t have anything to report about making GAIT a formal non-profit.
• Erik talked about what he’d learned about the status of the East Lake Sammamish Trail (ELST). In short, the county’s web site is far out of date, and he was waiting to hear back from county staff for an update.
• Lisa and Jeff reported on the Kryptonite bike rack program. It seems to be an even better deal than we had thought with the company covering all of the logistics of placing racks once the locations have been identified. Other communities have had 20-30 racks placed. We brainstormed a few more locations and will be sending photos to Kryptonite so they can start their decision making process.
• John reported sharing some preliminary artwork with Jeff who forgot to bring it to the meeting.

I reminded everyone that we’ll be staffing a table in the Pickering Barn at the Farmers’ Market on Saturday (snow or shine!) for the city’s Earth Day observance.

That was it for the “formal” part of the meeting and we gabbed about pedestrian right of way, bike racks in Corvalis (Oregon), Citizen Action Requests (the most traceable way to request that the city make a change), proposal of a periodic “Amble Around Issaquah” bike ride to make bikes more visible and show new riders how to get places, and lots of other stuff I didn’t write down.

The Brewhouse was jumping so we were again having trouble hearing each other. I’ll try to find a more inviting location for next month’s meeting.

CTC is short for Council Transportation Committee (and is part of the reason I’ve started a page here on the GAIT blog to decode some of the acronyms and mystery terms that crop up when dealing with transportation policy and our various government agencies)

The first thing on last week’s meeting agenda was a presentation by Steve Crawford from the Issaquah School District on the plans for a rebuilt campus at Issaquah High School. There will be one driveway for cars accessing the campus that will enter at the NW corner of the property from 2nd Avenue. There will be a traffic signal at this intersection with signal controlled crosswalks north/south on the east side of 2nd Avenue and east/west on the south side of the access road. A sidewalk will follow the south edge of the access road into campus. There is another driveway coming off 2nd Avenue farther south for bus access only. That entrance has a crosswalk with no signal across 2nd and sidewalks on both sides of the street running into campus. There will be nearly 600 car parking spaces on campus. There are bike racks in the plans. It is not clear how many bikes can be parked. I’d guess on the order of 50. When there were questions about pedestrian access, Mr. Crawford said, “There really aren’t that many high school kids that walk to school.”

Next was a presentation about plans for work on Newport Way west of SR900. This was the most complex item which a staff member whose name I didn’t catch was trying to de-mystify for the committee members. The gist of the discussion turned out to be about the fact that there are significant ped/bike improvements planned here as part of an agreement with the Talus developers. The original agreement was for fairly minor improvements (increase shoulders from 4 feet to 5 feet wide), but there is a move to instead create a 12 foot wide mixed use trail separate from the roadway. This plan is in negotiation but would result in a new mixed use trail from near SR900 up to SE 54th Street if I’m understanding correctly. The stretch at the beginning of Newport could go either along the existing course of Newport or along the extension of Maple Street across SR900 with a pedestrian bridge across Tibbetts Creek. This could be a pretty significant addition to our non-motorized transportation network if it can all come together.

Next was a brief discussion about changes to the Metro bus route 269. This was largely based on past discussions and it was not clear in this meeting what the changes are. They should go into effect in September, though ;-)

There was a discussion of ITS and someone’s going to have to help me out on what that stands for. It’s the traffic monitoring system they recently installed that I think encompasses the traffic cameras, signal coordination, condition signs, etc.

Complete Streets was next. It was confirmed that the Village Park Drive improvements that looked so expensive on the list before are off the list now. In its place, staff was proposing a full restriping of SE 43rd Way between East Lake Sammamish Parkway and 228th Ave SE to put 5 foot shoulders on both sides of the road rather than the existing 10 foot shoulder only on the downhill side. Estimated cost for this job was $77,000. There is some concern about parking for maintenance workers at a water district property on the north side of the road. Council members also reported that they weren’t aware of citizen desire for this link. These uncertainties kept this link off the recommended list at least for now. I believe the committee sent the list of improvements (new sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes, two radar speed signs, and an audible pedestrian signal for front and sunset) to the full council for approval so staff can get on with design and implementation.

There were a couple of other brief issues rushed through to finish up the meeting by about 6:30pm.

Thoughts and actions:

• It would be great to get some joint project going with the schools and GAIT, preferably led by students.
• Folks interested in ped/bike connections along Newport Way west of SR900 should contact their council members as it looks like the Talus developer is ready and willing to do a lot of work at no cost to the city if we can just get the decision made. I think it’s the Land Use Committee that is the next hurdle so start with council members McCarry, Rittenhouse, and Traeger.
• Folks who would use bike lanes on SE 43rd Way should likewise contact council members, especially those on the CTC (Barber, Butler, and Schaer) to express their desire to see that project added to this year’s Complete Streets improvements.
• GAIT should come up with a prioritized list of improvements we would like to see. Complete Streets is budgeted at $500,000 per year and we should be working to guide that money to where it can do the most good.