"Does three bikes per lane per hour during prime drive time amount to wise public policy? Voters will have their say in November, when they're asked to approve a $60 car tab fee that will direct a significant amount of funding toward—what else?—accommodating cyclists."

The Seattle Bike Blog does a good job of eviscerating this silly argument, which I'll quote at length below, but I'd just add: The proposed $60 vehicle license fee actually allocates only a very small percentage of its funding---just over 6 percent---to bike safety and access projects. To read the Weekly's smug dismissal of the proposal, you'd think we were spending billions converting highways to bike lanes.

Here's Seattle Bike Blog:

Next, in order to make the case that rechannelizations (or “road diets”) are about bikes (as the headline so boldly states), Seely goes through these remarkable mental gymnastics:

Road diets, says SDOT spokesperson Rick Sheridan, are “about safety, not bikes.” But more often than not, road diets (or “rechannelizations”)—at their simplest, a reduction of the number of lanes open to motor vehicles on a given arteriald—include new bike lanes. So they’re at least sort of about bikes.

Indeed! They are sort of about bikes. They are also sort of about dramatically reducing the rates of speeding, traffic collisions and pedestrian injuries and fatalities. They are sort of about reconnecting communities and installing more safe crosswalks. In other words, they’re about safer streets for everyone. Seely somehow acknowledges that the projects are not just about bikes, then makes the decision that he’s going to say they are anyway — all in the same sentence. You can almost feel the cognitive dissonance as Seely, a seasoned journalist, wrestles with the fact that his research does not fit into the story he wants to write. [...]

More worryingly, is the Weekly going to stake their stance in opposition to the Vehicle License Fee vote solely because McGinn wants it (and some of the money goes to bicycle projects)? Is Seely against the transit investments, which are clearly the focus of the VLF proposal? It was passed unanimously by the City Council and does not go as far as the mayor requested, so it could hardly be considered solely the mayor’s project. If Seely opposes the ballot measure, I would at least hope for an argument against it that addresses the bulk of the proposed funding.

So, Mr. Seely and the Weekly, please don’t go trashing road safety projects, spreading half-truths and drawing odd conclusions from incomplete data just because you have a personal vendetta against the mayor. That’s irresponsible, and your readers deserve better. These projects are needed in our communities and are rooted in decades of sound research and experience, not short-term politics.

In an earlier post, the blog broke down some of the numbers around road safety and road diets: Turns out that streets where the city implements traffic-calming measures like turn lanes (and, yes, lanes or sharrows for bikes) are much, much safer than streets where it doesn't. NE 45th between Wallingford and the U District, carries as much traffic as Rainier Ave. S. through Othello and Rainier Beach---"Yet Rainier is one of the deadliest streets in the city, while N 45th saw zero fatalities between 2005 and 2010."

It's hard to turn safer streets into an argument against the mayor, though. No wonder the Weekly didn't try.