Ballard industrial businesses appealed a decision last week that would have allowed the city to complete the "Missing Link" of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard, where bike riders must navigate poorly maintained roads with dangerous train tracks and heavy truck traffic north of the Ballard Fred Meyer. The businesses are challenging the city's "determination of [environmental] non-significance"---essentially, a finding that completing the trail won't harm the surrounding environment.

Seattle Bike Blog offers some context:

The trail, which stretches all the way to Redmond by means of the Samammish River Trail, ends abruptly at the Fred Meyer in Ballard. Riders, many of them more casual or new riders, are dumped onto dangerous and confusing industrial streets with train tracks to grab their wheels and rises between street level pavement and the shoulder tall enough to throw a rider to the ground. Meanwhile, large industrial trucks use the road heavily, which adds to the fear and can cause riders to ride on the dangerous shoulders instead of taking the lane.

Claims by opponents that they are concerned about safety are obviously not true. The city’s stack of studies on this trail in the past decade is a mile high at this point. To appeal a DNS on the grounds that you don’t think it has been studied enough doesn’t even make sense. Clearly no amount of studies are going to be enough for the group, and they are just willing to spend tons of money in order to delay the project and waste as much of everyone’s money as they can.

Meanwhile, people are getting hurt, victims of a senseless fight that has gone on many years too long.

The appeals could push construction out until 2012.