And the dialog continues. The Stranger has just published a well-researched and powerful deconstruction (if that’s the appropriate term) of the tunnel controversy entitled “What Could Possibly Go Wrong.” Note that the expected question-mark at the end is pointedly absent.

The series of stories by Dominic Holden is highly recommended reading.

Also, the mayor himself continues to put the screws on the project in a guest editorial in The Seattle Times. Now having spent most of my adult life working for newspapers, and The Times in particular, I can attest that newspapers never choose really really bad photos of someone to accompany an editorial position they disagree with — unless the temptation is just too great! But check it out and draw your own conclusions …

Kidding aside, we still believe that the tunnel project is the defining issue for Seattle as a city moving forward: As we’ve put it before, New Seattle walks, bikes and rides. Old Seattle has gas.

People feel out of place at best and unsafe at worst on the city’s streets. Pedestrians, bicyclists, the disabled, parents with kids or pets — all feel marginalized, or second-class citizens, in corridors which may lack sidewalks, wheelchair access, crosswalks, bike lanes and on down the line.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do moving forward,” McGinn understated. “It’s going to take a lot of work by people who believe in this to help us move our city to a different place.” Already battle lines are being drawn on just one of the mayor’s target streets — Nickerson. Support and opposition groups are popping up over the notion of a “road diet” to improve safety, and “angry drivers” are up in arms that they might have to share the road with other users.

To his credit, the mayor seems game for the challenge. Preceding an engaging panel skillfully moderated by Seattle Channel’s C.R. Douglas, McGinn noted that the city is accelerating implementation of its bike master plan, updating its transit master plan, and examining funding options — meaning difficult political choices involving highway mega-projects.

To get all of Seattle behind a new path, the mayor is broadening the scope of the initiative to address health (obesity), affordability (equity) and diversity. As does the recently formed Streets For All Seattle coalition, the city seeks to coalesce a New Seattle emerging in the 21st Century around a different vision of how to get around.

It will involve “placemaking” — the kind of environment that cultivates street life — and “more affordable” travel choices via bus and rail. It will also prioritize right-of-way for non-car transportation — feet, pedals and wheelchairs.

The ultimate question, as Seattle Department of Transportation manager of policy and planning Barbara Gray put it, is “What would it take in your neighborhood (to) get you to walk, bike and take transit for more of your trips?”

As we’ve noted before, McGinn likes to point out that moving ahead on alternatives to a car-dependent future would cost a fraction of the billion-dollar price tags associated with the Deep Bore Tunnel and 520 Interchange projects. Tilting at those windmills means taking on powerful Olympia and downtown Seattle interests — but then, that’s what Seattleites elected him to do.

Only a few dozen persons attended the Yesler session, which will be followed by four June meetings around the city. But they all fell into the category of engaged citizenry, asking thoughtful questions that represented significant constituencies in the city. This is not really a game of head counts anyway: Lobbyists don’t influence by their feet but with their checkbooks. Last night’s collection had a passion for the life of the city that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Part of altering the landscape will involve education. There needs to be clarity on what works, and doesn’t work, regarding making streets more hospitable.

Perhaps the biggest myth to rear its head last night was the notion that putting more pedestrians and cyclists into the mix means more danger, leading to more accidents.

Douglas asked: “As we’ve created more bike lanes and unfolded the Bike Master Plan, are there more bike accidents because we’re actually encouraging it on more routes?”

Unfortunately, Ed Ewing of the Cascade Bicycle Club didn’t have the data point to respond. “I don’t know how many more accidents there are per se,” he said, “I just know it’s an unfortunate part of using the roads here.”

For the cycling community, this is a crucial stat, because it’s counter-intuitive. As Ewing’s fellow panelist Anne Vernez Moudon, a U.W. professor of architecture and urban design, helpfully jumped in to clarify: “If you look at the research it’s pretty clear that the more people you have walking around, the more people you have biking around, at a certain point you have a drop in the number of collisions between cars and people.” She used the example of Pike Place, where cars move slowly simply because there are so many people around.

The most notable case in point is none other than New York City, not what one would think of as the most bike-friendly place in the world. As bike ridership has gone up, the number of bike-car accidents has dropped.

The safety in numbers factor is worth emphasizing as well for people like Seattle’s favorite transit user, Carla Saulter the “Bus Chick.” Even after taking a cycling safety class from Cascade Bicycle Club, Saulter told the gathering she feels too scared to ride a bike in the city.

“I need a bike path or something,” she said.

We were also taken aback by Douglas’ assertion that “we think of bicycling as a more elite sport, an elite activity and a white activity.” Granted C.R. likes to play the devil’s advocate. But the question feeds a persistent myth. In Seattle cycling may indeed be a white activity. But Seattle is awfully white. In the Bay Area, where we live part of the year, biking is far more diverse.

We’d like to see statistics on bike use for transportation (not recreation), correlated by ethnic group. If there is disparity, we suspect it’s not because of barriers to entry but due to role modeling. Minorities see baseball, basketball and football players with the big bucks, not bike riders. (Ironically, professional cycling in Europe was traditionally considered a way to get off the farm.)

“It’s expensive just to buy a bike!” Douglas declared. While fancy bikes certainly can run up the ka-ching, on Craigslist or at a yard sale you can get a pretty serviceable used bike for less than $100. At Gregg’s Cycles you can buy a good new bike for less than $500. If properly maintained, any bike costs less than $100 a year to operate.

This compared to the $9,500 that it takes to operate a family car annually.

Elitist … unsafe … expensive. If these misconceptions are allowed to persist, the middle part of Walk.Bike.Ride won’t get to the first intersection.

Multiple other mythologies were voiced, and exploded, over the course of the discussion. My favorite was the one where parents worried about unsafe streets confine their kids indoors, where they go onto the Internet. The Net, of course, is where the majority of child predation flourishes.

20 mph — check it out!

In response to our query, Gray said the city continues to look at measures to reduce speed. Hey Barbara — 20 m.p.h. Check it out:

“A survey by the Transport Research Laboratory of 20 mph zones across the UK and in other European countries found child road accidents fell by 67 percent, cyclist accidents by 29 percent and traffic flow by 27 percent.”

To the extent they represent prima facie arguments against alternative street use to cars, Douglas’ questions were on point. If anything, they show how entrenched prejudices are. “Safe streets” backers have the passion and the will to overcome unfounded myths; arming themselves with pertinent data will help as well.

If last night’s session is any indication, June’s community meetings in Bitter Lake, South Seattle, West Seattle and Northgate will provide a rousing start to the city’s streets campaign. Social networking tools via Twitter, Facebook and crowd-sourcing hopefully will come into play as well. Ultimately, the sell job for Walk.Bike.Ride will have to be done by the public through the public in open forums — not in the cloistered backrooms of City Hall.

Below: See the full video of the Health, Equity and Transportation forum.

The opening line from “The Big Lebowski” kept rolling through my mind as Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, King County Council member Larry Phillips and a supporting cast of street activists rolled out a new “Walk Bike Ride” campaign at the Beacon Hill light rail station this afternoon.

It’s an impressive initiative to get people out of cars and into their neighborhoods, stores and workplaces by transit, bike and foot. It calls for things like a “street diet” for Nickerson (removing lanes of cars to prioritize bikes and pedestrians), expanding light rail to Ballard and/or West Seattle, and making unsafe roads and intersections pedestrian-friendly, crosswalk by bike lane by traffic light.

A new Transit Master Plan will be devised, initiated with a public forum on May 26th at Yesler Community Center and bolstered with community meetings June 1, 7, 14 and 21 around Seattle.

All this, without any dollar sign attached.

Normally a big press announcement like this ballyhooing a major city-county initiative has lots of numbers attached to it. But despite repeated questioning from a somewhat bewildered press corps, McGinn et al refused to assign price tags or say what funding sources potentially exist.

So why were we all here?

The more the mayor talked, the clearer it became that the entire shindig was aimed at getting people to, in Steve Jobs’ immortal slogan, “Think Different.” The word “prioritizing” kept popping up. If we really care about our future, and our kids’ future, do we want to be spending billions on highways for cars? Or do we want to start reassigning critical funds to things like sidewalks, bike lanes, safer intersections, calmer thoroughfares and people-moving systems?

Because we can’t have both.

Seattle is changing. It’s dawning on commuters that it really does cost $9,500 a year to drive a family car 15,000 miles. That 20 to 25 percent of their annual family budget really does go to gas and wheels and parking and maintenance (mostly for commuting), a percentage second only to their mortgage. That riding a bus or train to work makes a whole lot more sense financially, for them and the city, than driving and parking and paying.

And that, according to the National Personal Transportation Survey, “25 percent of all trips are made within a mile of the home, 40 percent of all trips are within two miles of the home, and 50 percent of the working population commutes five miles or less to work. Yet more than 82 percent of trips five miles or less are made by personal motor vehicle.”

Seattle is facing $8 billion on highway projects, but somehow $30 million (or whatever; the figure has been cited but was not specified at the press conference) to improve streets for people is an impossible number in these trying economic times.

If the $4B-plus Deep Bore Tunnel and the $300M West Mercer Project and the $300M Seawall all get built, the mayor implied, there won’t be scat left over for streets.

“The really really big one here is cost overruns on the tunnel,” McGinn said. “If we find ourselves down the road having to pay out of pocket, it will crowd out funding not only for other transportation projects in the budget but will affect our entire city budget in really drastic, negative ways.

“In the long term, we could be in a situation like Boston, where they finance current operations out of debt because of cost overruns on the Big Dig.”

So a grim game of fiscal brinksmanship is going on between the mayor and the progressive transportation interests supporting him — and the highway lobby, with the governor, the City Council and downtown money interests supporting them.

It’s going to be an uphill battle to get the City Council to change its vote on the tunnel, or the governor to seriously address cost overruns, or downtown Seattle interests to take pedestrian safety and bike lanes and rail expansion seriously. Highway projects get supported by Big Money precisely because they require Big Money to build.

In a way, McGinn faces the same challenges as President Obama with everything from health reform to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. For Obama, entrenched interests of Old America won’t budge off the dime to acknowledge and accommodate New America. But both understand you have to be patient to get change, even if you take criticism from people who voted for you over not doing enough, quickly enough.

“It’s premature to talk about funding,” McGinn said. This fall’s budget proposal, his first as mayor, will have real numbers, he promised.

But without real change in the public’s priorities — meaning how taxpayer dollars are spent for transportation — those numbers won’t be impressive.

What can we as citizens do to change the minds of people we otherwise support — like the governor, like the City Council, and even our neighbors and community leaders? Groups including Streets for All Seattle and Cascade Bicycle Club and People’s Waterfront Coalition and others say they will continue to work with vested interests.

But the crucial thing is to change the dialogue from highways to streets, from multi-billion-dollar mega-projects to bike lanes and crosswalks and buses and rail.

The mayor knows about uphill battles. As if to set an example, he walked, biked and rode yesterday, taking his bike on light rail to Beacon Hill, walking it to the press conference, and then riding back to City Hall.

Dressed in a spiffy black business suit, he can be forgiven for not cycling to the event.

But “going back to City Hall, it’s all downhill,” he said with a grin.

Literally, yes. Figuratively, no way.

Portland mountain bike riders get to say their piece tomorrow in a big powwow on singletrack for Forest Park.

If you go mountain biking alone, be sure to tell someone where.

In China they’re producing bigger, faster e-bikes. But sheesh, not any lighter.

It would be fun to ask this police officer what he thinks of this police officer.

Taipei Cycle Show retrospective: “The success of the 2010 Taipei Cycle means that bike exports are on the rise, which will ultimately benefit the North / South American market which Interbike serves. As many U.S. managers and I discussed, we hope a good deal of the 4.3 million units shipped from Taiwan for an average price point of $290.54 in 2009 (which is expected to grow by double digits in 2010) will ultimately translate to strong sales and margins on sales floors all across North and South America.”

BikingBis: 5-year sentence for hitting a cyclist on a charity ride.

Is mountain biking, which roared ahead of road cycling in the ’90s post-Greg Lemond and pre-Lance Armstrong, making a comeback? The stats say yes. But the recommendation that mtb’ing needs “another Johnny T” (Tomac) is only partly right. What mountain biking needs is more places to ride.

Memo to Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn: Did you see what happened to cycling Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker when he left his FILA cable-padlocked outside a meeting recently … a meeting about bicycles?!

1. In the Washington State legislature, a “Vulnerable User” bill. Similar legislation failed last year but the Cascade Bicycle Club and its relentless advocacy director, David Hiller, will be trying again. A Traffic Justice Summit in October set the agenda for why legislation is needed: Too many cyclists are being injured or killed with at max a traffic ticket being issued. Growing cycling awareness among elected leaders, particularly in Seattle and King County, should help Cascade’s efforts.

Nationally, watch for additional 3-feet-please laws stipulating wider berth for bikes v. cars.

2. Seattle native Jill Kintner gets her world championship. Kintner narrowly missed the 2009 rainbow jersey in Australia, and the 2009 season that was supposed to be a gradual comeback after winter knee surgery turned into a breakout year. Barring injury, 2010 should belong to Jill. She’s featured btw in a new DVD, “Women of Dirt,” that will premiere in Seattle Feb. 5th.

3. On the road side, how high can Tyler Farrar go? The Wenatchee lad put his stamp on pro sprint competition with a number of impressive showings in 2009, and only a bullet named Mark Cavendish stood in his way for a Tour stage win or two. It’ll be a tall order to beat the Manx Missile, but if anyone has the tools and moxy, it’s a one-year-wiser Farrar.

Stevens Pass Mountain Bike Park: Great things in store

4. Stevens Pass mountain bike park. This has been on the books for what seems like forever, but with release of a sweeping Environmental Impact Statement in December looks ready to finally roll. During the mountain bike season thousands of Seattle-area riders go to Whistler B.C.’s MTB park; it’s time that money and those resources stayed in Washington. Stevens won’t be another Whistler out of the gate of course, but its closer proximity and potential for expansion hold huge promise for the locals.

5. Mayor Mike McGinn’s cycling agenda. We have big hopes for Seattle’s new cycling mayor and the city’s cycling blueprint. Not that everything will change overnight, but McGinn truly appreciates the bicycle’s role in urban transportation networks, and from his insights and leadership we believe Seattle could emerge as the leading bike municipality in America (currently held by Portland). If nothing else, the mayoral gas bill is sure to shrink from his predecessor’s SUV-hoggin’ totals.

6. Helmet cams rock on. We’re seeing these things everywhere, on freeriders, XC epics, roadie rides. The technology has finally improved to the point where wireless and HD are de facto in new models, plus battery advances mean lighter, less bulky units. The downside is a lot of trail video showing the backside of a guy in front. But for a personal record of your big adventures with virtually no fiddle factor, you can’t beat a helmet cam.

7. More comeback from Lance Armstrong. The “Lance factor” played a big role in cycling’s expansion through the 2000s and it looks like at least through the coming year Lance will continue to draw headlines. We don’t expect Lance to win, say, the Tour de France, but somehow just being in the race makes him the winner, at least in the American public’s mind. A host of other pro cyclists have more power and ability than Lance at this point in his career, but until someone with enough charm and charisma emerges to take his place, Lance will remain King.

8. Cross-country mountain biking, too, makes a comeback. This may sound weird, but the signals we’re getting from shops, riders and tour agencies is that the mountain-bike-park thing is starting to flip. (This despite all the excitement over Stevens’ opening.) A new generation of riders whose longest climbs involved a chairlift are going for lighter, longer-distance frames and equipment as a whole new matrix of high-country riding awaits their discovery. Old-timers like us just nod in amusement. Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance’s work on South Snoqualmie Fork trails will pay off in 2010.

9. The economy continues to hammer the bike biz. 2009 totals aren’t available yet, but data through the third quarter suggest a 10 to 20 percent pullback on sales and profit. While much of that is in high-end equipment, and isn’t catastrophic on an annual basis, it nonetheless threatens the sustainability of numerous smaller shops and businesses. Our gut sense is that things will continue — using a bike suspension term — to wallow through 2010, neither much worse nor much better. Only a turnaround in the jobs picture, which will put more people on bikes for transportation and give them discretionary spending for bling and trips, will signal any upside for cycling.

10. Northwest freeride expansion continues. In addition to whatever Stevens Pass comes up with, Galbraith Mountain will undoubtedly continue its march to world-classdom with its ever-expanding, more challenging trails network. Kudos to all the gang up in Bellingham who do such a great job on Galby. Closer to Seattle, Evergreen’s work on Duthie Hill outside of Issaquah is getting all kinds of props. And Evergreen’s Colonnade mini-park under I-5 will remain the best place to sharpen skillz — watch for it in forthcoming DVD format as well.

Duthie Hill from Walter Yi on Vimeo.