Bicycle Friendly Kent

Joan and I were blessed to be able to spend the last week of July on the west coast visiting family and friends and doing a little sight-seeing.  Joan has a brother and family in the Seattle area and our son Joel is in the middle of a summer photo internship at the Seattlle Times.  

Joel was able to join us on his days off on a tour of the Olympic National Park where we were able to enjoy such areas as Ruby Beach, hurricane ridge, Port Angeles, Sequim, Hoodsport and Port Townsend. After we dropped him back off, Joan and I were also able to spend a few days in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and enjoy a one day side trip to San Juan Island.

One of the highlights of the trip was spending time on bicycles in Vancouver City Center, where we rode on their world class bicycle boulevards as well as the renowned, "sea wall" which encircles the downtown as well as the fabulous Stanley Park.  

Nothing beats a bicycle as a way of getting to understand a place. You can travel between spots easily and explore places that a car or tour bus can not easily get to. You can also set your own pace, stop just as easily, understand the grades, feel the breeze, and enjoy the sounds and smells of a place. Joan and I highly recommend this trip, if you ever get a chance. It was a great 30th anniversary present to each other.

In both Seattle and Vancouver there have been numerous efforts to integrate the bicycle into the fabric of the city. Planners in these communities understand that bicycles are the most egalitarian form of transportation, and that with a little effort they can be a critical part of the way we access and traverse our towns. In Vancouver we were pleased to be able to experience a bicycle boulevard, obtain a bicycle route map for the metro-plex, enjoy a broad esplanade where bicycles and pedestrians are seperated from motorists, as well as ride on streets that are still open to motors but which are marked so as to give bicyclists the right of way.

While we were not able to ride in Seattle, that city has made the bicycle even more central than Vancouver. Ranked fourth in the Bicycle Magazine rankings and a Gold Level bicycle friendly community according to the League of American Bicyclists, every street I drove in had bicyclists using it. Seattle's 2011 bicycling guide is a thing of beauty and outlines an extensive network of lanes, trails, streets and facilities that give the bicyclists their rightful place in the community.

When we travel, Joan and I are always comparing what other communities are like and how they do things and comparing them to our own place. While there are a lot of reasons for people who enjoy cycling and see it as a critical element of creating sustainable communities to move to communities that are already are bicycle friendly, we in Kent should be proud at the progress we have already made in becoming more bicycle friendly and work at making it better. 

has become increasingly conducive to bicycle riding, including some space in the esplanade, as well as a large number of bicycle racks. The city itself has made some strides by passing a policy requiring that bikelanes be included in all major road reconstructions, and by helping to extend the esplandade. has included bicycle racks on its buses for a number of years and has included bicycle storage facilities in the new multimodal center. Of course many of us are already enjoying the fruits of creating the Portage Hike and Bike Trail between Kent and Ravenna and look forward to final connections to the Summit Metroparks Trail to the west.

All of these developments are wonderful and stand us in the position to take the next step of becoming an official "Bicycle Friendly Community" and further enhancing the ridability of our town. The Bicycle Friendly Community program consists of "Five E's." According to the League of American Bicyclists that sponsors the program, "Applicant communities are judged in five categories often referred to as the Five Es. These are Engineering, Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, and Evaluation and Planning. A community must demonstrate achievements in each of the five categories in order to be considered for an award."

Each of the "E's" is critical because it recognizes that bicycling is a matter of the culture of the city and that in order to make it safe and rewarding to use the bicycle as a primary mode of transport we must be serious about not only facilities but also education, enforcement and evaluation.  

1. Cyclists must be held as accountable for properly operating their vehicle as motorists are. 
2. Proper signage and programs must be in place to assure that all road users understand that cyclists have as much right to the road as motorists.
3. Cyclists must be treated equally in terms of facilities and motorists not given preference either to roadway space, parking, or signalization.

Luckily for us in Kent, there are many best practices from other communities that can improve the bikability at a very low cost.

1. Designating curb lanes on S.R. 43 and S.R. 59 by signs and markings to alert motorists that bikes and buses should have priority.
2. Building bikelanes into the renovation of Summit Street to improve pedestrian safety on the .
3. Providing bicycle lockers and shower facilities in businesses and public buildings.  
4. Identify arterial routes with sharrows — shared roadway arrows — to let motorists know that bicyclists have full access to the roadway.
5. Designate some streets as bicycle priority streets where it is understood that bicyclists use them as a main connector to arterials, trails and paths. This would especially apply to Water Street and Franklin Avenue as we connect two lose ends of the Portage trail at Summit Street and Crain Avenue.
6. Giving incentives to those who bike on a regular basis, as it saves on the need for the city to build, maintain and subsidize parking — space that can otherwise be used for greenspace or the construction of productive, tax- generating businesses.

While I understand that some people don't get the importance of bicycles to those of us who ride them, there are compelling reasons why we should make the bicycle a central focus of our efforts at economic development:

1. Bicycling leads to healthier people, who miss less work, and reduce healthcare costs.
2. Bicycling reduces the number of cars on the road and improves the efficiency of our current road system and can even reduce congestion.
3. Bicycling reduces our consumption of fossil fuels, which improves our carbon footprint and keeps money in the local economy to be used for more important things.

As Elly Blue has written in Grist, "Bicycling makes a lot of sense in a landscape built for cars. Bikes are fast and flexible enough to fill the gap between transforming spread-out driving destinations to walkable, accessible communities. With 40 percent of our driving trips spanning less than two miles, the distances are feasible — so long as the roads aren't designed to be terrifying. It takes minimal investments, mostly in mitigating the effects of sharing space with motor vehicles, for bicycling to almost overnight become a convenient and attractive choice for many, many people.

In the coming weeks, months and years, let us all work together to make Kent even friendlier....and become an official Bicycle Friendly Community.