AdventuresNW
Saturday, April 25, marks the return of a historic Seattle bike ride that gives people the opportunity to bicycle on a car-free highway.
First held in 2016, the Emerald City Ride starts in the Stadium District of Seattle and proceeds onto SR-99 for a short distance before bringing participants up and over the West Seattle Bridge, which rises more than 140 feet over the Duwamish River.
The ride offers incredible views of the Seattle skyline and the Cascade Range, and enables riders to soak in the beauty of the Puget Sound region from a four-lane highway with no worry of being run over.
The Emerald City Ride, organized by Cascade Bicycle Club, is a unique treat for people who love to ride bikes. It’s one of my favorite organized bike rides in the Seattle region because it attracts families, parents pulling their kids in bicycle trailers, and people of all bicycling abilities joyously pedaling together as one.
The Ride is only made possible because of the temporary closure of SR-99 and the West Seattle Bridge to automobile traffic for one hour on a weekend morning. Bicycling on a car-free highway always sparks thoughts of a different approach to the way people move about in cities.
Traffic Sewers
Urbanists have a term for highways and freeways that run through the heart of cities: Traffic Sewers.
It’s colorful language that conveys the point that our governments spend vast sums of money on transportation infrastructure that functions as a sewer for cars, harming the livability of our cities and polluting our air to flush motor vehicles from A to B in the fastest possible manner.
Imagine if, instead of highways and high-speed roads built only to accommodate motor vehicle traffic that spews air and noise pollution and harms our climate, we had Cycle Highways: long-distance bike routes that gave people the option to bike between cities and towns.
Cycle Highways exist in Europe and in other parts of the world, and now the Washington State Department of Transportation is looking into the feasibility of creating and connecting long-distance bike routes across Washington.
Washington Bike Summit
Creating bikeable communities doesn’t happen without support from the public and devoted bicycle advocates. If you’d like to learn how to make your community more bikeable, I recommend the Washington Bike Walk Roll Summit, from April 1-3 in Wenatchee, WA.
Public support for bicycling and common-sense leadership is more vital now than ever due to the incompetence of this presidential administration. Join me on the Emerald City Ride in April, and at the ballot box in November.
Paul Tolme, the Journalist on the Loose, is an outdoors writer, award-winning environmental journalist, and blogger for Cascade Bicycle Club. He lives with his wife in a Seattle houseboat crammed with bikes, skis, snowboards, kayaks, and paddleboards, but no regrets. His work can be seen at paultolme.com and cascade.org/news.
