With another months of results on the books for the city’s Walk, Bike, Ride Challenge, Queen Anne has managed to maintain its second place ranking as one of the city’s leading ‘hoods to cut down on driving miles and transfer vehicle trips to walk, bike or public transit trips. But the competition is also heating up – third place neighborhood PhinneyWood is trailing Queen Anne by only 20 miles.

“That’s could easily be 1 participant’s contribution for just 1 or 2 trips,” says Walk, Bike, Ride representative David Allen.

Queen Anne, which has been behind only Ballard in terms of miles saved and trips transferred all summer, has made quite an impact on the competition results so far – neighborhood participants have saved some 6,804 miles so far by walking, bicycling or riding public transit, promoting health and wellness, reducing greenhouse gases, and saving money on gas and car repairs.

Those miles add up to Queen Anne-ers saving some 538 trips by choosing to walk, bike or ride instead of drive.

There’s just a few weeks left of the Walk, Bike, Ride Challenge, and all participants who switch at least two car trips per week to walking, biking, or riding public transit will be entered to win one of the following:

• Electric bike from e-Moto
• Apple iPad
• Pan Pacific Hotel stay
• Zipcar $250 gift card
• REI $100 gift card
• Nordstrom’s $100 gift card (supplied by Commute Seattle)
• $100 gift card good at seven farmers’ markets

Citywide over 1,200 people have participated in the program so far, saving more than 150,000 miles of driving and over 75 tons of climate pollution.

If you’d like to participate in the challenge and help Queen Anne win, there’s still time to join. Simply register at SDOT’s Walk, Bike, Ride site, and report all of your saved trips. SDOT will announce the winning neighborhoods in September.

One month into the city’s Walk, Bike, Ride Challenge, a competition pitting neighborhood against neighborhood to see which can get the most residents out of their cars and onto sidewalks and trails, Queen Anne commuters are in second place for both the number of trips switching to walking, biking or riding, and in miles of driving saved.

Queen Anne-ers have racked up some 4,918 miles of driving saved so far, and are second behind Ballard in both categories. However the PhinneyWood neighborhood, currently in third place, is fast approaching Queen Anne’s numbers. Citywide program participants saved over 100,000 miles of driving in July alone.

There are still five weeks left in the competition (the program ends on August 31), so Queen Anne still has a chance to swoop in for the win and show our sister neighborhoods that just because we live atop a steep ol’ hill doesn’t mean we can’t get out and put our feet, and pedals, to the pavement. From the folks behind the Walk, Bike, Ride program:

Here’s more info on the Jul/Aug program, the neighborhood competition and the current rankings.  If you sign up you’ll receive weekly emails with encouragement and tips, and for every trip you switch you earn a change to win some great prizes, like an electric bike, iPad, night stay at the Pan Pacific Hotel and more.

The Seattle Walking Map and the Seattle Bike Map can help you take advantage of everyday opportunities to get exercise as you get around. Here’s a blow up of Queen Anne on the Seattle Walking Map with destinations in the neighborhood, travel times by foot, hills and more.

The second annual Spoke & Food bicycle friendly fundraising event is coming up next week, on Tuesday, June 28. Heather Slettebak, who founded the event with her husband, sent us this information:

Billed as “an evening of dining and bikes”, the event will take place in 13+ different Seattle area neighborhoods. The event asks people to bicycle to (and from) one of the “host” restaurants on the night of the event. This community event was launched last year as a way to influence the culture of Seattle, to show how easy and fun bicycling to and from dinner is and to raise money for a well-deserving Seattle area non-profit. A new non-profit beneficiary is selected each year. This year’s event will benefit the Children’s Garden Education program at Seattle Tilth where as last year’s event benefited the Lettuce Link program at Solid Ground.

The funds raised for the non-profit are donated directly to the non-profit by each of the “host” restaurants who have agreed to give 20% of all the diner bills collected between 5:00pm and 10:00pm on Tuesday, June 28th. In return of their gracious support, the Spoke & Food event will have only one host restaurant in each of the neighborhoods that are involved.

Here in Queen Anne you can participate in Spoke & Food at Via Tribunali. Here is the list of others participating restaurants around town:

Ballard – Snoose Junction Pizzeria
Capitol Hill – The Lookout
Madrona – The Madrona Alehouse
Maple Leaf – Snappy Dragon
Phinney Ridge – Stumbling Goat Bistro
Phinney Ridge – The Barking Dog Alehouse
Ravenna – Casa D’Italia
Roosevelt – The Scarlet Tree
University District – Chaco Canyon Organic Café
Wallingford – Julia’s
White Center – Proletariat Pizza
West Seattle – Chaco Canyon Organic Café

Starting Monday, Seattle City Light crews will begin to install new lines on the towers that are on either side of the Ship Canal at Warren Avenue.

The detour for the Burke Gilman trail while the towers are being worked on. For a larger image, click here (.pdf).

“Because a safety buffer zone must be established under the towers, a portion of the Burke-Gilman Trail and Ship Canal Trail will be closed intermittently. Bike trail detour signage will be placed in advance of our work,” the press release states.

The crews will work Mondays through Saturdays, depending on weather, from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. through the summer. The trail detours will be in place between 6:45 a.m. and 5:15 p.m.

Before work can begin on the tower, Osprey nest material on the north tower needs to be moved.

In recent days a pair of Osprey have been apparently placing a small amount of nest material atop the north tower. City Light biologists will be checking first for young/eggs before we begin the project – and if there are none, we will remove the nest material and move forward with the project. We will continue to monitor the situation and, if warranted, investigate ways to provide safe nest sites in the area in the future.

More information on this project can be found here.

Commute cyclists – who seem to be all over the news currently (here’s a column by Danny Westneat from The Seattle Times yesterday) – will be out in force today, Friday, May 20.

May is National Bike to School Month, and today is our local Bike to Work/School Day, sponsored by the Cascade Bicycle Club.

The bike club is hosting 41 cycle commuter stations around the area, although the closest to Queen Anne are at the Olympic Sculpture Park, the DIY Salal Credit Union at 1515 Dexter Ave, and the Fremont Bridge. There’s an interactive map here.

Remember to give Queen Anne cyclists extra credit, as they commute up the second tallest hill in the city.

Anybody have plans for bicycling on Friday?

Bicyclists participating in the annual worldwide Ride of Silence, commemorating those lost in cyclist/motorist accidents, will be riding through Queen Anne as part of their citywide cycle tonight, Wednesday, May 18.

The ride, which will start at the Burke Gilman Trail at Gas Works Park at approximately 6:30 p.m. tonight, will continue along Eastlake to downtown, where is will loop back around and up via Westlake Avenue along Queen Anne hill, and back to Gas Works. The ride is scheduled to pass City Hall at approximately 7 p.m., which means participants will be coming through Queen Anne anywhere between 7:15 and 7:45 p.m. tonight.

View more route information here.

If you’d like to participate in Seattle’s 7th Annual Ride of Silence, plan to arrive at Gas Works at 6 p.m.. There will be dedications and a spoken word event before the ride, as well as a post-cycle social gathering from 8 to 10 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, and with more than 15,000 bicyclists in Seattle, is likely to have a big turnout. For more information check out the Seattle Ride of Silence website.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) pushed ahead with the much debated Nickerson Street road diet back in August, decreasing the thoroughfare from four lanes to one in each direction, a center turn lane, with bike lanes on either side.

Despite support from a USDOT’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) study that found that rechannelizations in California, Washington and Iowa have not adversely affected roadway capacity, and data that indicates that the controversial Stone Way road diet improved safety and traffic, the decision to revamp Nickerson was met with split support and opposition. A survey we took back in June indicated that, of the 711 who participated, 48.4 percent were in support of the road diet, while 51.6 percent were against the plan.

Some of the major concerns opponents of the road diet argued is that, being one of only two east-west streets directly feeding Ballard industries, decreased lanes on Nickerson would be met with increased congestion and an inability to meet capacity demands. However preliminary data from the city indicates that the road diet is working as planned, according to a report from Publicola published Wednesday.

The city says that data collected three months after the implementation of the Nickerson rechannelization shows that the same number of cars have been able to use the street, and that speeds along the street have slowed somewhat since the restriping. From Publicola:

SDOT traffic manager Eric Widstrand says the data are still preliminary; the city will continue to do traffic counts through the rest of 2011 and release a full report after the end of the year. However, so far, the study shows that car and freight traffic haven’t been harmed by the lane reduction, and that traffic has slowed to be somewhat closer to the 30-mph speed limit on the road.

“Capacity has not decreased,” Widstrand says. “We’re still able to accommodate” between 15,000 and 18,000 vehicles a day.

Proponents of the project note that decreased speeding along Nickerson as a result of the rechannelization is a good thing. Since the road diet, the average speed along Nickerson has gone down from 40 to 44 miles per hour, to between 34 and 37 mph, according to Publicola. From the report:

“We aren’t slowing anyone down excessively,” Widstrand says. The new speeds remain higher than the 30 mph speed limit, but are still safer for cyclists and pedestrians. A pedestrian hit at 40 mph is about 85 percent likely to die; a pedestrian hit at 30 mph is about 40 percent likely to be killed.

Cascade Bicycle Club representative David Hiller says that neither the group nor the city has yet studied whether the number of cyclists using Nickerson has increased since the rechannelization (which was the case after the Stone Way road diet).

Many Queen Anne residents have dreamed of a pedestrian/bike overpass that would link them to Myrtle Edwards Park and the waterfront.  We’ve learned that bridge is one step closer to becoming reality several years after it was first proposed.

Proposed location of overpass

SDOT wants to build a bridge from the east side of Elliott/Western Avenues at Thomas Street all the way across the railroad tracks to Myrtle Edwards Park.  Just this week, a recommendation was made at the Puget Sound Regional Council to provide a $3.96 million grant for the overpass.  If the PSRC Executive Board approves it, that grant would represent the final funding for the $10 million project.  SDOT tells us they could start construction in the first quarter of 2011 and finish it one year later.

The city’s Department of Planning and Development also recently issued a ruling that found no serious environmental problems with the project, but there will be some conditions.  Several trees would be removed along W. Thomas Street and some streets in the immediate area would be reconfigured.  More than 70 people submitted comments about the proposed bridge and only three of them expressed concerns.

Just in time to enjoy the nice(r) weather, the city of Seattle—or at least its Department of Transportation—is asking its residents to cut two car trips a week in July by taking the Walk Bike Ride Challenge, which runs from July 4 to July 31.

Maybe for someone like me, who drives my car nearly everywhere, this might be a good incentive to follow the example of our bike riding mayor and take out my two wheels, or use public transportation more, or walk, whether it’s for work or play.

Seattleites can register any time to start cutting car trips as early as Independence Day. Each time someone reports a week they are entered into a drawing to win one of two $250 REI gift certificates, a one night stay at the Pan Pacific Hotel Seattle, or a $175 Zipcar package.

Businesses can go to the same Web site and pledge to support their employees in taking the challenge.

Walk Bike Ride is a multi-year initiative. As part of the initiative, the city will update the Transit Master Plan, implement projects like the Dexter Avenue N buffered bicycle lanes project, keep freight moving, engage the public, focus on future funding, protect and expand transit, integrate Walk Bike Ride principles into neighborhood planning, and promote sustainable transit-oriented communities with thriving business districts.

Today, Bike to Work Day, we and our news partners The Seattle Times are wondering just how safe you are getting around town on two wheels.

The Times has put together a top ten regional list of bike trouble spots. At the top of the list: the south end of Ballard Bridge, where it meets the bases of both Queen Anne and Magnolia. Here’s what the Times says about this particular bicycling danger zone:

Ballard Bridge’s south end

A curb divides 40 mph vehicles from cyclists and pedestrians on the bridge, and the greatest test of will comes a few yards from the bridge’s south end, where a cut in the curb channels riders directly onto 15th Avenue West. You have to “look for a big opening, where you’re going to jump out,” says cyclist Chris Phillips.

Sightline Institute founder Alan Durning highlighted this spot in April 2007 for his essay series “Bike Neglect.” The city has since added warning signs. “It gives us a false sense of security, thinking we can go out there and the cars are going to stop,” said rider Jo Simonian.

Solution: The city is spending $50,000 to study whether it can add width to bike lanes on the bridge, and improve safety at both ends.

I’ve just discovered Veloroutes.org, a website that documents bicycle route and elevation information city by city, for the sheer purpose of serving as a resource for cycling lovers around the country (though it started right here in Seattle)! On Veloroutes, people are able to create and upload routes, as well as search for new ones to try out based on key locations and neighborhoods.

A search for Queen Anne brought up a whole list of varying routes taking riders everywhere from the University of Washington to Capitol Hill, Golden Gardens, Green Lake, West Seattle and even across the Ballard Locks.

Some routes have more specific destinations, such as this one designed to show you the way from Fremont to the Queen Anne Top Pot Doughnuts (at the top of the hill, I might add!), or this one, which takes riders on a “coffee and pie” tour of the city’s best eats!

All routes include the distance, elevation data as you travel and estimated times based on a varying number of speeds. Whether you’re taking a tour of Queen Anne, following Galer across town, looping around Montlake, heading to Microsoft, or just taking the long way home, taking a little ride through Queen Anne could be a great way to enjoy our new stint of February sunshine!

Looking for a slightly less intense way to enjoy the sun? Try out Queen Anne’s walkability, or explore some of our 121 historic (and often hidden) public staircases!