Seattle’s three official bike counters recorded more riders in January 2019 than any prior January on record. Now that’s worthy of the pomp and circumstance of a ribbon cutting; instead the local political brass were cutting the ribbon for the SR-99 tunnel this weekend–which opened to cars this morning–and hoping it was heavily used to justify its great expense.
The surge in biking shows that even though little was done to accommodate extra people biking during Seattle’s SR-99 highway closure, people will bike if it’s the most convenient and accessible option available to them. A dry and warm January absolutely played a role in the increase, after Downtown Mobility Director Heather Marx famously said that asking people to bike and walk in January was a “heavy lift.” But what’s also almost irrefutable is the fact that many of the biking trips replaced car trips that would otherwise have happened downtown if the closure had not occurred.
There were almost 73,000 trips on the Fremont bridge in January, 14,000 more trips than were made last January, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) reports. Spokane Street between downtown and West Seattle saw nearly 25,000 trips, more than 9,800 trips than January 2018, and the 2nd Ave bike counter downtown saw over 10,000 additional trips compared to last year, clocking over 25,000 trips last month. That’s over 34,000 extra trips that happened via bicycle and went past one of those three counters, or a 27% increase over 2018.
