Much soul-searching is going on after a 28-year-old Texas jogger was struck by a bike and later died. The woman was wearing “headphones” (earbuds?) and turned quickly in the path of a bike whose rider apparently was trying to warn her of passing.

Now the East Dallas blog, citing Renton’s speed reduction on the Cedar River Trail following the cycling-caused death of an elderly woman earlier this year, wonders if similar curbs should be placed on the White Rock Trail.

Our experience is that trails self-regulate pretty well, as in the case of the Burke-Gilman and Green Lake bike-pedestrian paths. But with more people cycling and using bikes for transportation as much as recreation, conflicts are bound to keep growing. Renton’s 10 mph speed limit pretty much consigns commuter and transportation bikes (along with experienced cyclists of all stripe) to alternate routes, which the city should speedily provide.

At Green Lake, conflicts were greatly reduced by ringing the lake with on–street bike lanes that faster cyclists could use instead of the bike path. More thoughts from Jonathan Maus at BikePortland.org:

Yes, it’s important for path users to share, but the larger issue here is that there are simply not enough non-motorized corridors…

So sure, the cyclist in us celebrates our good fortune. There’s just one problem.

With everyone else hurting, we cannot feel too good about getting ours.

If there’s one thing we missed at last night’s inaugural public hearing on the budget, it was a shared sense of burden. Group after deserving group, cause after worthy cause, decried the slashes in funding — their own funding. The Non-Profit Assistance Center … SCAN public TV … Friends of the Library … library hour cutbacks, homeless funding, refugee assistance, neighborhood support, low-income housing. All earnestly pleaded for more dollars.

Nobody denies their legitimate claim to more funding. Nobody believes their constituencies deserve less. But the brutal truth is that the city has fewer dollars this year than last, and will probably fall short of projected revenue as well. The downward cycle is in full swing — increased unemployment means less spending, less spending means less revenue, less revenue means increased unemployment. To quote Leonard Cohen, everybody knows the good guys lost.

The fact is, cyclists as a niche group understand, sympathize with, and directly support things like libraries, neighborhood centers, minority needs, homeless efforts and other causes. And it’s just as true that each of these constituencies supports the work of their fellow underprivileged or disenfranchised.

When everyone is hurting, it helps no one to hold out an I-me-mine hand. We should all be in this together. Sending the message that our bottom line should be funded without expressing solidarity with other deserving efforts plays into the hands of corporate kingpins who justify their own greed and selfishness on the grounds that even Tibetan refugees are only out for their own self-interest. It’s divide and conquer at its most cynical.

As Michael Moore put it in “Sicko,” we have to decide whether we’re a me society or a we society.

Eventually most Council members showed.

What if this happened. What if everyone got together at the start of the hearing and gathered at the microphone and, in unison, said, We all support one another’s efforts to make Seattle a better place. We all support one another’s need for restored funding. We all want to work with the City Council and Mayor McGinn to figure out how to distribute the budget burden fairly and equitably among all constituencies. And we’ll all look out for all our own best interests.

As a cyclist, our message to the Council is:

We’re exceedingly grateful for Mayor Mike McGinn’s funding of cycling, pedestrian and transportation alternatives. But any satisfaction we derive must be tempered by the plight of Seattle’s many deserving but underfunded other efforts, from libraries to the homeless, the hungry and minority communities. We urge the City Council to find a way to reduce the deep budget slashes imposed on all Seattle’s social-support efforts. If we have to sacrifice our own gains, so be it. The goal is fair fiscal distribution. Perhaps we could start by reassessing the wisdom of a $4 billion tunnel — an unimaginable amount of money that would fund any number of city causes in perpetuity.

The question re businesses who keep filing suit to block completion of the Burke-Gilman Trail is: Will the Seattle city attorney’s office follow the same path?

According to the S.F. attorney’s office, ”Aggressively pursuing the fullest possible recovery of the taxpayers’ costs in litigation is a standard practice.”

Quote from David Hiller, advocacy director for Seattle’s Cascade Bicycle Club:

I hope the city protects the interests of its taxpayers in any and every way they can.

Courtesy Bainbridge Island Chamber of Commerce

The very people who are helping the state comply with the Climate Law, the VMT Law, the people who are taking up little space on the ferries and not congesting the roads around terminals — it’s those people who are a problem.

Right. You don’t disincentivize behavior you’re trying to encourage.

In June the city’s Department of Transportation, affectionately known as SDOT, proposed putting cycle tracks on Dexter Avenue. That plan fell through for a number of reasons that should have been gobsmackingly obvious before SDOT announced it, but whatever. Instead buffered bike lanes will grace Dexter.

Lo and behold, cycle tracks re–emerged at the Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board’s September monthly meeting. The plan as reported by Publicola was to install them along Linden Avenue North between North 145th and 128th Streets as part of the Interurban bike route. “SDOT Proposes City’s First Cycle Track (Again),” the headline reads.

But when BikeIntelligencer contacted SDOT, project manager Connie Zimmerman informed us that the term “cycle tracks” did not apply to the Linden project. Instead, the project officially involves buffered bike lanes. (Indeed, there is no mention of the term on the official Web page.)

A classic cycle track.

As near as we can tell, the answer is that they’re spelled differently.

From a strict-constructionist linguistic standpoint, they are different — or at least once were. Cycle tracks technically refer to bike lanes separated from motorized vehicles by a physical barrier. In Europe that can mean everything from ramps to concrete medians. In Portland all it means is striped pavement.

Although it’s come into popular use only in recent bike-boom years in the U.S., the term actually originated nearly a century ago in England — which, after due deliberation and consultation with real bike riders, wound up rejecting the whole notion. Its current popularity apparently stems from the success of separated bicycle facilities in Denmark and the Netherlands — although they call them, prosaically enough, “paths.”

Under the classic definition, the Linden bike lanes do not qualify as cycle tracks. They’re separated from vehicles, but only by space (a buffer) — painted stripes on the pavement. Our video below shows recently installed buffered lanes on North 130th Street.

Unfortunately, a lot of newer bike-lane installations that do not meet the strict definition of cycle tracks have come to be lumped under the term. Somehow cycle tracks sounds cooler than bike lanes (which may explain Portland’s misuse). Silly as it may be, a project is likelier to get taken more seriously as “cycle tracks” than the more pedestrian (pun unavoidable) sounding bike lanes.

Whatever its cachet, we at BikeIntelligencer hate the term cycle tracks. It sounds like bikes sharing railroad right of way. Or what track bikes ride on.

As Zimmerman put it, cycle tracks “is a generic word like food. It could mean a variety of things.”

It’s unintuitive, it’s mushy, and it’s lost all meaning. We applaud SDOT for backing off the designation on Linden. And if the city never implements something called “cycle tracks,” we’ll be fine with that too.

Cascade Bicycle Club reported converting more than 30 drivers to the joys of bike commuting through its Green Bike project, which gave drivers a free bike if they did more than 50 percent of their commuting by bike over a three-month period.

We talked to one of the participants, Phyllis Rowland, HR assistant and recruiter for Wellspring Family Services. A “bike to the beach” kind of rider before the program, Phyllis has some words of advice to would-be bike commuters for making the transition a successful one. [By the way, if you commute via SODO, Cascade needs your input.]

Phyllis Rowland congratulated by City Council member Tom Rasmussen

From Cascade’s press release:

The Green Bike Project aims to convert drive-alone commuters to bicycle commuting by providing equipment, instruction, encouragement and incentives. Cascade Bicycle Club outfits each person with a bicycle, helmet and lock and gives them safety and mechanical training. In return, participants pledged to replace at least 50 percent of their drive-alone commutes with bike commutes by Aug. 1. Those who achieved the goal will be rewarded with ownership of the bike they’ve used throughout the program.

An impressive 86 percent of participants successfully achieved their goal this year.

“This is an incredible result. In only three months, we’ve helped more than 30 people new to bike commuting become comfortable, confident, and competent cyclists. I don’t know of many other programs that can boast an 86 percent success rate,” said Chuck Ayers, executive director of the Cascade Bicycle Club.

The program does more than transform participants’ commutes; it transforms lives.

“I love riding my bike to work,” said Alex, of the Odyssey School. “I plan to keep it up for the rest of my life.”

“I was really amazed with how quickly my body adapted to riding. I was really sore the first time I did it, and noticed huge improvements in how well I was able to go,” said Heather of Darigold. “I was one of those ‘move out of the way, bicyclists!’ type of drivers before this, but now have a lot more understanding for them.”

Participating companies in the 2010 program were: Case Design, Committee for Children, Darigold, Iron Bow Technologies, Outdoor Research, Odyssey School, and Wellspring Family Services.

The Green Bike Project demonstrates that with encouragement and support, people can dramatically change travel habits by trying bike commuting. That ultimately means fewer cars on the road, more money in peoples’ pockets, and improved health throughout the region.

Seattle Summer Streets 2010 exploded onto Phinney and Greenwood last night as they barricaded the boulevard and people poured onto the pavement to celebrate.

Mayor Mike McGinn, like many participants, was blown away by the turnout. Bubble Man put on his usual delightful show, booths from Feet First, Streets for All Seattle, Walk Bike Ride and others set a “streets are for everyone” theme.

Sustainable Greenwood-Phinney, bringing a focus on living simply and climate change, had a boom box playing ’60s tunes for “Dancing in the Streets.”

Balmy summer weather aided turnout. Restaurants and pubs were jammed, Santoro’s Books had a display of doggie treats and pet books. An accurate estimate of the crowd was probably impossible as throngs milled along Greenwood from 65th to 87th, but it was well into four figures and jammed the main drag at its height.

Shannon Markley, wheelchair-bound from a recent biking accident, got a surprise birthday cake and “Happy Birthday!” choir from the gathering. The mayor even stopped by to say hello.

“This is beyond my expectations, beyond anyone’s expectations,” McGinn said. “It’s the perfect representation of what Summer Streets is for — anything you want it to be!”

PhinneyWood.com also was there.

On Horsesass.org, Goldy recaps his typically quixotic opposition: “Where there’s a will, there’s a Seattle way.”

On Crosscut, Skip Berger suggests (along the lines of) mortgaging Council members’ homes as collateral against wrong and costly decision-making: “How to prevent a boondoggle, on the waterfront and beyond.”

The Seattle Times, following up on a Page 1 feature, “Hidden challenges of Highway 99 tunnel,” reports: “Highway 99 tunnel foes may propose city referendum.” Curiously, only The Times seems to be calling this the Highway 99 tunnel, and even at that only recently. It’s better known as the Deep-Bore Tunnel project, in part because Highway 99 already has a tunnel (better known as the Battery Street tunnel). Although we assume The Times has a reason, we’ve found no explanation as to why they’ve adopted this puzzling, and confusing, convention.

Seattle City Council President Richard Conlin, the subject of our two-part interview, posts for himself on Publicola: “State Overrun Language Serves Only to Alarm and Divide Seattleites.”

Over at HorsesAss.org, Goldy suggests that Richard and the rest of the Council (the ones who support the tunnel, at least) should put their money where their mouths are:

“Why not just have the council pass a resolution restating everything you just said here, that the cost overrun provision is illegal and unenforceable, and that the council would vigorously oppose any effort to impose such on Seattle taxpayers. Hell, pass an ordinance prohibiting Seattle from paying for any cost overruns.”

Meanwhile, Seattle city activist Elizabeth Campbell, whose Seattle Citizens Against the Tunnel is poised to file suit against the tunnel once the City Council acts, has raised a possible conflict of interest against the city’s tunnel consultants.