Thanks @NickSattele & @asher_971 for notifying us about damage to the new Melrose Ave protected bike lane. We made a short-term fix over the weekend and plan to return to make long-term repairs including adding additional rebar. https://t.co/mDexgbVzHw
— Seattle Department of Transportation (@seattledot) June 6, 2023
The Seattle Department of Transportation hopes a few steel rods will keep its latest solution for quickly, affordably, and hopefully safely protecting bike lanes from cars from going the way of the notoriously flimsy “Broadway bikeway Smurf turds.”
The department has responded to issues identified in the newly installed concrete separators on the bike lane portion of the Melrose Promenade project with a plan for a quick and longer-term fix.
CHS reported here on the final pieces of the $4.3 million project moving into place including the new protected bike lane that officials hope will make for better Capitol Hill connections to Seattle’s growing network of safer streets.
While the new concrete curb design being used to separate the bike lane along Melrose between Pine and Denny was fast and easy to install, there have been reports of uneven pours and cracking.
A Broadway bollard in happier times (Image: SDOT)
SDOT says it is making quick fixes to straighten out the curbs with a plan for long-term repairs involving the addition of steel rebar rods.
Those long-term plans sound better than the solution SDOT came up with in 2016 after artistic blue twisting barriers set up to protect the Broadway bike lane proved to be too wimpy to stand up to cars and trucks. Compared to the excrement of the bright blue Smurf cartoon characters, SDOT eventually trucked the failed barriers away.
Hopefully, SDOT’s plans this time will stick and the concrete separator curbs can be used safely in the city’s bike projects without becoming the next Smurfing Seattle bike lane failure.
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Can we please address the inadequacy and wastefulness of the Seattle Department of Transportation? This is too great a metaphor for what’s been going on for decades. Half assed thought on an important topic, undo, half assed implementation of a new, poorly conceived solution. Even if they put rebar in there, not one single person will be better served by 6″ of concrete than a line in the road.
Without commenting on SDOT in general, I have to disagree about concrete vs a line; people block bike lanes constantly, rendering them effectively useless; and concrete barriers like this do make people less likely to park there.