The state of our divided Seattle bike movement

I am writing this post before King County Elections releases the November 11 ballot count, so the result of the Seattle mayoral election is still unknown. It has been torture waiting for the result, but perhaps it is also a unique opportunity for some honest reflection on the current state of the Seattle bike movement as a political force. Voting is over, so there are no more voters to win over, yet without a result the finger-pointing and arguing stage hasn't yet fully begun.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but the recent Shifter video and the unstated subtext bubbling below the Life After Cars event last week has had me thinking a lot about this odd moment in which the local bike movement is split on the most important political position in the city: Mayor. Seattle Bike Blog and the Urbanist enthusiastically endorsed Katie Wilson while Washington Bikes endorsed Bruce Harrell. It's the first time since writing this blog we have been fully in opposition about a major election (in 2021 WA Bikes dual-endorsed Harrell and Lorena Gonzalez while Seattle Bike Blog sole-endorsed Gonzalez).

When you look back through Seattle's modern bike history (about 1968-present), it's amazing what bike folks can accomplish when people are united and pulling in the same direction. But when bike folks are divided, things can get bad. We saw this play out in Seattle but especially across the U.S. during the vehicular cycling" era in which many avid cyclists" organized against the creation of bike lanes and even sometimes trails because they were convinced that cycling is safest when people learn to bike on roadways like they are driving a car. The result was that any momentum from the 60s and 70s to invest in bike lanes and develop safe bike infrastructure standards was set back by decades. Why would a politician, even a good one, use any of their political capital to build a bike lane that a bunch of bike riders would protest alongside any upset drivers? Maintaining the status quo is politically easy, and making change is difficult. Political leaders need to know that bike supporters will have their back when the bikelash" comes.

Seattle's current split is far less significant than in the vehicular cycling days (documented at length in a recent Not Just Bikes video and touched on in my book). The difference, I'd argue, is more about competing theories of change than it is about competing philosophies about cycling itself. Washington Bikes and Seattle Bike Blog both support investments in safer cycling infrastructure and expanding bicycle education and using bikes for direct action through efforts like the Pedaling Relief Project. The big difference is about whether to seek influence through an existing problematic power structure that has been pretty good for bike lanes or to support a bike-riding candidate seeking to create a whole new path to power filled with potential and unknowns. Should the Seattle bike movement be part of the establishment or part of the change? Does power come from the people or from corporate sponsors? Is this a growing pain for a movement that is getting more mainstream and therefore has a wider range of political affinities, or is it a sign of trouble? Can all of these be a little bit true at the same time?

It's undeniably good that both candidates courted voters who care about cycling. We did not have a mayoral candidate who was out there campaigning on the promise that they would tear out the bike lanes, and that alone is a sign of the bike movement's power and the popularity of cycling and safe streets among Seattle voters. It has been obviously beneficial to the cause of increased cycling infrastructure that WA Bikes has had a friend in Mayor Harrell these past four years. If Harrell manages to pull out a close victory as the last ballots are counted (and perhaps recounted), he will absolutely owe some of it to the tens of thousands of dollars WA Bikes spent on mailers supporting him as well as their messages of support to their very large email list. WA Bikes reached significantly into a demographic that you would expect to be strong for Wilson: Bike riders.

But this is also the exact scenario I fear most because I think infighting within the Seattle bike movement would be intense and could leave lasting scars. If the margin for defeating Wilson ends up within the feasible WA Bikes influence range, things could get ugly. People calling out WA Bikes for failing to even dual endorse a bike-riding candidate and longtime transportation advocate has already been a constant buzz in recent months. If it ends up being decisive, well, grievances will be uncorked.

Maybe this is a fight that needs to happen. Hashing out disagreements is an important part of any social movement. In some ways, this is how Seattle Neighborhood Greenways initially came to be. It wasn't an opposition group to Cascade Bicycle Club (back then Cascade was a political org, but a merger and major reorganization in 2015 turned Cascade into a non-partisan 501c3 org and WA Bikes into a politically-active 501c4 org). But as I wrote in my book, Cascade was in crisis in 2011 over the organization's political actions. Cascade initially backed Greg Nickels in the 2009 primary, but then backed the anti-establishment candidate for mayor Mike McGinn during the general election (CORRECTION: I initially wrote that Cascade had backed McGinn over Nickels in the primary, but this was not accurate. I regret the error.). This is around the time I started Seattle Bike Blog (July 2010), so one of my first big tasks was to report on the chaos within Cascade and in some ways play the mediator. Several people at the time described it to me as a civil war." At one point, the Board of Directors fired the Executive Director because he refused to fire the club's Advocacy Director, then a bunch of members organized against the Board and all but forced them to resign en masse. To outside observers they looked like the dog that caught the car. Cascade had been building their influence over decades and finally got a bike-riding champion elected mayor, then promptly imploded under the pressure of their own success.

Amid all that infighting, neighbors worried that the bike movement was going to blow its chance to take advantage of a rare opportunity for change started creating their own small neighborhood groups focused on supporting safe streets. They sidestepped the Cascade chaos and focused on the real goal: Safe streets. They were enormously successful, and the groups eventually formed into Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, a bottom-up organization in which the main org exists largely to support the advocacy work of the neighborhood groups. Greenways groups along with Cascade (once it got its shit together) were able to set in motion the foundations for today's bike network such as the creation of the 2014 Bicycle Master Plan (at the time probably the best such plan in the nation), a pilot protected bike lane on 2nd Ave downtown, and the inclusion of unprecedented funding for bike improvements in the 2015 Move Seattle levy. It's remarkable in retrospect that the Seattle bike movement was able to so deftly navigate such an awful implosion at Cascade and come of it stronger than before.

Now we have almost the opposite dynamic at play. WA Bikes supported the establishment candidate this time, and many of the people in their base are angry about it. My read is that it's probably better for WA Bikes (and its sister organization Cascade) if Wilson pulls off the win. WA Bikes is significantly out of step with a large portion of its own base on this one, and I'm sure folks will organize some kind of response. Harrell supporters can get mad at Seattle Bike Blog and no critical bike movement infrastructure will be seriously damaged (this is the power of independent media). But we need WA Bikes and Cascade.

As I mentioned in the Shifter video, it's a small miracle that Cascade (and WA Bikes) exists the way it does. It has so many more resources to dedicate to advocacy than most other bicycling organizations in the country because its early organizers made the decision to direct the revenue from the club's hit rides back into the club and its advocacy efforts. It was a volunteer-run organization for a long time, and it kept pumping out hit after hit with its rides. A huge number of people have participated in Cascade events, and Cascade is often a person's first contact with cycling. It is a powerful presence culturally and politically, and it's not something that could be created today if we were starting from scratch. It's a special institution that belongs in part to everyone who rides a bike here, which is why I think people are feeling so angry, hurt and sold out. In a town where corporate profits are constantly prioritized above the people, it's painful to see that even the bike club is acting on the same side as the ultrawealthy megadonors behind the Harrell campaign and his not-so-independent PAC. If in 2011 they were the dog that caught the car, in 2025 they are the car.

I know that the bike movement in Seattle is strong enough and cares enough to navigate whatever is ahead. I hope this post can help provide a basis of understanding about what happened last time there was a big disagreement over local politics within the club as well as some of the dynamics at play. No matter what happens (if anything happens at all), we will come out stronger so long as everyone keeps their eyes on the end goal: More people bicycling safely.