Watch: Best Side Cycling rides the new Beacon Hill bike lanes + Some issues to fix

It's great to Hanoch back on the bike shooting footage of the city over at Best Side Cycling. He rode the new bike lanes on 15th Ave S and Beacon Ave on Beacon Hill and has great footage of the improvements as well as some footage of a couple problem spots.

The new lanes officially opened earlier this month, and there was a community celebration and bike ride September 19. They may be the most significant bike lanes the city has ever installed in south Seattle, finally connecting parts of District 2 to the downtown bike network. Jefferson Park has become a bike route nexus with arms branching out toward Georgetown, Columbia City and now the Beacon Hill business district and downtown. Sure, going up and over the top of the hill is not often the easiest route to take, but the view is spectacular.

Most of the project is amazing. I even wrote that the section in front of Beacon Hill Station might be the best street redesign in SDOT's history." This project is amazing overall. But there are a few problem spots that need adjustments, and Hanoch's video does a good job highlighting them.

We voiced some concerns about the 15th/Beacon intersection during design and again in our first ride post, and Hanoch's footage and commentary confirms some of the stuff I was worried about. It's not clear how to turn left when heading southbound with the green light, and there needs to be separation between the bike lane and right-turning cars headed northbound. It's a major conflict point where I can easily see a person biking and a person driving both thinking the same space is theirs to use, which is recipe for a collision. If there's a red traffic light that also has a green turn arrow, that means someone in a general traffic lane can turn right. So if there's a red bike signal but also a green right turn arrow, can someone on a bike turn right? It isn't clear, and my natural assumption would be to say yes because the red bike signal is probably for people heading straight. But at this intersection, it seems like maybe SDOT is trying to tell people on bikes not to turn? I honestly don't know, which is a problem of the design. You can even see in the video that Hanoch starts to go before second guessing and stopping.

Can someone on a bike turn right during this green right turn signal or not? I don't know the answer. From the Best Side Cycling video at 8:45.

A few little curbs forcing people to make wider turns around the biking space would go a long way to protect the cycling space and slow the speeds of turning traffic. They would also need to direct people using the left turn lane from southbound 15th to make a wider turn, perhaps by painting those turning lane guide lines through the intersection that you see elsewhere. Here's a very rough sketch of what I'm talking about:

SDOT's design concept for the 15th and Beacon intersection. My very rough suggestions are in red. The curb for protecting people on bikes waiting to turn left from southbound 15th would require changing how the right turn lane on southbound Beacon Ave works, so that might be a bigger project. But there's gotta be a more intuitive design of some kind.

There are more dramatic solutions if the city were to fully redesign the whole intersection, such as some Dutch-style concepts. Even without a full intersection redesign, there are also some lower-budget changes that could go a long way to creating separation at conflict points. This is one of the most unusual intersection designs in the whole city, and SDOT should observe how it's working and make adjustments because it's not quite right yet.

There's also another moment in the video where someone biking in front of Hanoch is nearly right hooked by a person making the wide right turn from northbound Beacon Ave onto S Forest Street/17th Ave S (7:52). On one hand, no it's not great, but you can see the benefit of the gap between the general traffic lane and the bike lane, which gave everyone enough warning to avoid a collision (if the bike lane were directly next to the general traffic lane, there would be no warning). However, the problem is exacerbated here because 17th Ave S does not meet Beacon at a right angle like a typical street, so people turning aren't making a 90-degree turn. SDOT should give this intersection another look, and perhaps they can better T it up or find some other way to simplify all the movements so a close call like this one does not turn into a collision in the future.

This project was very complicated, so it's not a surprise that parts of the design would need some adjusting. In fact, that's how this is supposed to work. We want SDOT to put out the best design they can, but then observe real world behaviors and make adjustments when people inevitably don't follow their designs as they had intended. People are unpredictable, and street use is impossibly complicated. They've done this with previous bike lanes (the 2nd Ave bike lane went through several rounds of adjustments), and I am sure they can do the same here.