Bicyclists: I hate your passive-aggressive, politically correct guts. Well, not all of you, but most of you. As a pedestrian, I have been mowed down (twice) on pedestrian sidewalks by aggressive, inattentive cyclists. As a motorist, I have narrowly missed killing numerous two-wheelers, including a toddler in a bike trailer whose kamikaze chauffeur was running a red light.

This seems to be the deal: "We don't burn fossil fuels. Therefore we have the right to ignore any and all traffic laws, joyfully risk killing ourselves and others, and seethe with righteous indignation if anyone takes exception to this entitlement."

Are bicyclists required to obey traffic laws? If so, which ones? Are they free to use both sidewalks, where they are the aggressor, and streets, where many are all too willing to take the role of the self-righteous, whining victim?

As that great American philosopher John Belushi said, "Wise up." Is there even such a thing a bicycle liability insurance?

the former head of amtrak picks winners? think not. but please feel free to move to Minnesota bicyclists.

Why does Crosscut keep putting this kind of crap on its site? The future is not bicycles and transit. The future is electric cars and other extremely energy-efficient motor vehicles.

And the future of energy prices is down -- not up. We are going to be entering an age of very inexpensive energy, due partly to great increases in energy efficiency of motor vehicles, but also vastly more energy-efficient lighting, heating, appliances, etc.

The transit in our area is just insanely expensive to build and operate. Transit is utterly NON-sustainable. It just costs way too much.

And only a tiny percentage of people are ever going to ride bicycles on a regular basis. There is a current upturn in bike riding, but that is more of a fad than anything else. The same thing happened back in the early 70's, but it faded just like this will.

The best opportunity for reducing vehicle and energy use is the internet. Tele-commuting has vastly more potential for reducing energy use and reducing travel than transit or bicycling. Already the internet has eliminated many trips to banks, stores, and work. And, that is a trend that will continue to grow, unlike bicycling.

Why doesn't crosscut publish the 2010 Seattle Bicycle Count, which showed that, between 2008 and 2010, outside of downtown, bicycles counted citywide in Seattle DEcreased by almost 15%, from 4,666 in 2008 to 3,981 in 2010. A lot of people are not able to ride bikes, and most of those who can, don't want to. And even the tiny percentage of people who do ride bicycles regularly don't ride them in bad weather. So, what is the point?

How about getting realistic, instead of promoting this childish fantasy crap?

@gabowker, I refer you to RCW 46.61.755 Traffic laws apply to persons riding bicycles:

"(1) Every person riding a bicycle upon a roadway shall be granted all of the rights and shall be subject to all of the duties applicable to the driver of a vehicle by this chapter, except as to special regulations in RCW 46.61.750 through 46.61.780"

I used to be an avid bicyclist, but a bad knee, bad hip and amputation of part of my right foot make that impossible. I now mostly get around on my (fully CARB-compliant) 2007 Vespa motorscooter, which gets ~75 mpg. And it's fun to ride... some friends and I rode from Bellingham to Vancouver, B.C. over the weekend.

Y'know, I've never, ever seen an adult on a bicycle who looked like he/she was having a good time...

Electrify the bus routes on major arterials to reduce some of that carbon.
Whatever you do, minimize putting tracks in the ground, unless you want to see more cyclists doing summersaults in front of you.
When eke tidied buses reach the end of the wire they unhook and flexibly keep going to maximize their route potential. Rails don't do that.

I noticed a lot of people cycling around Shoreline yesterday, because they had complete streets, and hadn't fished every local penny they have into a disjointed streetcar to nowhere "system".

You want complete streets with bike lanes? Then stop pissing our money away on putting rails in the ground.

Pick a new mayor that isn't bent on increasing upzone curb appeal by supplanting perfectly good buses with pretty streetcars. Build complete streets throughout the city, an not just where the at large mayor and council need votes.

I love technology, iPad turned "electrified" into "eke tidied".

I'll throw a dollar into the street if anybody can tell me what "eke tidied" could possibly mean.

Btw, bikes are great, Seattle should go ahead and finish pushing families out of Seattle, I'll go somewhere with my family where population through regeneration and not through attracting believers in the CBC lifestyle, aka the Seattle Shakers.

Yes, some bike riders ignore the rules. News flash: some car drivers do, too. Seattle drivers as a group in fact are arguably some of the worst drivers in North America. They drive slow in the passing lane, over-yield at four-way intersections, don't understand how to accelerate and merge onto a highway, honk at people making legal U-turns, and inexplicably forget to drive in the rain during our two weeks of nice weather every August. Car drivers around here have absolutely nothing to be proud of in terms of driving talent, yet they get outraged when they see a biker do something stupid.

What makes Seattle a bad place to ride your bike is not the bikers who don't follow the rules, it's the lack of infrastructure to separate the bikers from our insane, untalented car drivers.

In fact, our car culture is so awful that just this past week it caught the attention of no less an international audience than the Economist (https://www.economist.com/node/21528302), which points out the high death rate in Seattle has less to do with bikers than with infrastructure decisions that favor cars at the expense of bike riders' lives.

And, no, I'm not a bike rider. Can't stand the hills. I drive most everywhere. But at least I get that the bikers aren't really the problem.

News flash, really old news flash, go into the Seattle Times archives and you will find stories about people on bikes blowing through stop signs and speeding down hills 80 years ago, 80.

What is also interesting is that Portland whose residents buy less gas because they are bicycling, riding transit, use that extra cash to buy stuff locally, like theater, food, entertainment etc. Somewhere around $1Billion was the number cited due to the 10x multiplier of buying stuff from people who live in your community who then spend it locally as well.

It's not about bicyclists or drivers breaking road laws, or congestion, it's about not sending your money to another country vs spending it here.

In the 40 years I've lived in this region I've watched its war against public transport escalate so relentlessly I doubt Seattle or any of the other Puget Sound cities will ever achieve even minimally adequate service.

The first obstacle was xenophobia -- any sort of transit beyond herky-jerky buses and a few trackless trolleys condemned as alien thinking, an invasive threat to the prevalent ethos.

Voting "no" on transit was therefore cleverly positioned as voting "yes" on maintaining the so-called "Pacific Northwest Lifestyle."

Next the xenophobia gradually morphed into unabashed country-club exclusionism -- the notion voting against adequate public transport was a vote to keep out so-called "undesirables."

Now, with any expansion of transit forever prohibited by economic reality, transit is routinely damned as a form of welfare. The ultimate objective is obviously the destruction of all transit – exactly as is already occurring in Tacoma, Pierce County and rural Whatcom County.

When you point out to the transit-haters "not everyone can afford cars," they invariably answer "then let them move elsewhere."

Which reveals two things. It shows us the socioeconomic bigotry lurking beneath the allegedly "progressive" facade Pugetopolis shows the world, and it lays bear the breathtaking hypocrisy of the region's claim to environmental enlightenment.

Part 1

“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
- Mark Twain

The references to the Twin Cities and Portland are appropriate. Those metro areas’ leaders do a great job of providing transit – especially light rail – to people and businesses.

In the Twin Cities they built out a new light rail system from downtown to the airport (with a tunnel) in just a couple of years in the mid-2000’s. There was NO new local taxing for that. About the same population is served (2.8 million) but look how no long-term bonding and no new taxing was used there for light rail:

http://www.metrotransit.org/facts-about-trains-and-construction.aspx

The new local taxing associated with ST2 will be about $85 billion over the next forty years, as required by the terms of Sound Transit bond sales contracts. That’s a terrible way to finance trains and buses – no other government leaders do that to their communities. Punishing people financially is the name of the game here though.

TriMet serves three counties around Portland. It only needs about $230 million in local taxing each year to provide expanding bus and rail systems and services to roughly the same population as the Sound Transit taxing area. The TriMet financing plan imposes taxes on businesses directly. The average family there pays $0 in direct taxes for transit each year. The way it was designed here though is nasty: Sound Transit and Metro taxes cost the average family of four here $500 every year, and that amount is set to increase for decades. Oh, and the Seattle TBD is putting car tab fees on top of that ($20 in new annual taxes per vehicle per year, and maybe another $60 per vehicle per year if voters approve the thing at the November general election).

Unlike any of their peers the bus and train services providers here impose crushingly-heavy regressive taxes. The details are disgusting. Taxes here targeting individuals and families in the name of transit are brutally high. Metro obtained (mostly sales tax) tax increases in 1980, 1993, 2001, 2006, and this year. Sound Transit obtained very high sales tax powers twice recently. All of those tax hikes were designed by the political leadership to target individuals (for the most part).

Part 2

Metro, the transit governments in Pierce and Snohomish counties, and Sound Transit will confiscate something on the order of $1.5 billion in local tax revenue this year alone. All the peers do a great job of providing bus service, and expanding train systems, with far less annual local tax revenue:

- TriMet (Portland) - $233 million;

- DART (Dallas/Fort Worth) - $385 million;

- San Diego Metropolitan Transit System - $100 million; and

- RTID (Denver) - $241 million.

There is no excuse for taxing in the name of transit here to be many times higher than in the peer metro areas.

Not only are dedicated transit taxes too high here, they are the wrong kinds of taxes. The 1.8% sales tax for buses and trains, plus existing car tab taxes and Metro’s property tax, are designed to target people. That’s exactly what we don’t need now. Those regressive taxes act as an anchor on consumer spending, and it is consumer spending that pulls areas out of recessions.

Moreover, consider how much of the regressive tax revenue confiscated for “transit” is lost to the local economy, immediately. Sound Transit can’t ship sales tax revenue out of the local private sector fast enough. It makes huge payments to institutional bondholders, bankers, non-local contractors, and multi-national engineering firms. Vast sums are sent off to BNSF and Amtrak. Oversees contractors get hundreds of millions of dollars for railsets and tunnel boring machines. The size of Sound Transit’s payments to entities such as other local governments, state governments, and indirectly to unions are staggering – far larger than its peers make. That kind of taxing and spending is terrible for the local economy.

Want to elect smarter, more frugal individuals onto Sound Transit’s board to get better results out of that local government? Tough nuts. It was designed to be entirely unaccountable to people. That means its treatment of the public – especially in a financial sense – will deteriorate.