Bellevue trying to meet the needs of bike riders

Friday morning I biked down to City Hall to help tabulate the results of a bicycle-pedestrian count made earlier in the week.

Instead of planting volunteers on street-corners with clipboards and pencils, the Bellevue transportation planners had downloaded footage from the city's wide-ranging network of traffic cams to cover the locations they wanted to count.

So, after keypunching some survey results, I sat there for an hour in climate-controlled comfort watching cars and figures passing through the videostream on the computer screen. During the 7 to 8 a.m. time period on Tuesday, I counted scores of pedestrians, and just one lone cyclist. And he was riding on the sidewalk. (The other volunteer, known on Twitter as VeloBusDriver, counted just one cyclist as well.)

Illustrates problem

Although this isn't a prime cross-town route for bicyclists, it kind of illustrated the problem for bike commuting and Bellevue: Most streets in Bellevue are not bike friendly.

As evidence, check the results in the 2008 American Community Survey. An estimated 0.47% of the workforce in Bellevue commutes to work. Compare that to the 2.9% rate in nearby Seattle.

That might all change. As the Seattle Times reported from its front page on Friday, “Bellevue makes way for bikes.”

The City Council has approved a plan calling for building 80 miles of bike lanes, 90 miles of sidewalks, and 20 miles of trail improvements. The next step is finding the money to pay for it.

Meanwhile, the city installed two dozen bike racks around downtown, helped get bike route signs for Eastside cities, and installed new bike lanes on SE 26th Street.

Adding 80 miles of bike lanes would more than double the 33 miles of bike lanes now in the city; the 20 miles of trail improvements would nearly be double as well.

You can see all the results of the hard work done by transportation planners and citizen's committees at the Bellevue's website: Transportation Choices – Pedestrian Bicycle Plan. There's also a huge map of all the bicycle route improvements.

I've read that bike infrastructure (bike lanes, sharrows, paths) brings more bicyclists to the streets. Let's hope that Bellevue's efforts pay off. Maybe in a couple of years I'll have to hit the pause button on the videostream to catch up on the tally of bicyclists riding through the same intersection.