The first road hazard I ever fell victim to on a bicycle was a storm drain with openings that ran parallel to the road. I picked myself up, danced around as I waited for my road-burned palms to cool off, and said to myself, “I'll never do that again.”
That would have been in the early 1960s. Those road grates have disappeared in many places since then, although they're still quite common on the streets of Seattle.
Replacing those storms grates is a problem in Seattle and other cities. Storm grates cost about $500 apiece, not counting labor and other drain work that might be needed.
Won lawsuit
The Seattle P-I has a good story today — “Cyclists want action on dangerous storm drains” — about a guy who won $25,000 from the city in court after he crashed when his bicycle tire got caught in a storm drain.
He and his attorney went for the settlement after the city balked at doing an inventory and replacing dangerous grates within one year.
The P-I reports that Seattle has about 70,000 to 80,000 storm drains, many of which have those wide vertical slots. The problem is that the city doesn't know where they are and hasn't come up with a plan to inventory them.
Replacement rules
There are guidelines that cities can follow in addressing the parallel storm grate problem. The P-I says:
Bicycle advocates point to the 2003 manual on uniform traffic control devices, created by the U.S. Department of Transportation, which states a white line should mark grates that are “inappropriate for bicycle travel.”
The 1999 guide for the development of bicycle facilities, created by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, specifies that grates with bars parallel to the direction of travel should be physically corrected “as soon as practicable after they're identified.”
The city's Complete Streets policy calls for replacing those grates.
Meanwhile, Tacoma said its bicycle-unfriendly grates were replaced in the 1980s, and Bellevue officials say they're phasing them out.
Recent Comments