solarbird | Entries tagged with northshore

Pretty good turnout in Bothell, counter had over 600 which is a good number given the rain in the morning and the unavoidable timing against Easter. It’s not what we had two weeks ago, but again, conflicts and worse conditions. Still a bit larger than the 2018-era protests, so I’d call that another win.

There were still people on the far downtown bridge, too. There were just gaps in the crowd between us and them.

I’d post pics but I totally forgot my phone, oops. And I actually did, not “lol no phone oops” did.

There was one (1) counter-protestor/heckler on the ground; he didn’t like my “NO KINGS” signs at all and started ranting about how Biden was the real “king” they got rid of. He didn’t have a sign himself and stayed pretty far back; I came across him accidentally while walking around testing our FRS radio range.

(As an aside: FRS handheld radios are f’real, team. Consider getting some and getting practice with them. No license needed, they’re channelised so can’t be used against you as “police scanners,” the range is shockingly good, and even with prices going up they’re super affordable. Ignore the only review on that Best Buy link; those are the exact model we bought. If you want to spend a little more you can get the T30 version, which has a headset and I think is rechargeable, but is otherwise pretty much the same radio and only comes in black. We specifically wanted replaceable batteries for extended-blackout reasons. Just remember: they are NOT private. Just relatively obscure.)

As with every other protest here, we had overwhelming support from the vehicle crowd. Hundreds to one in favour, easily, just like in person. I even got support from a presumably embarrassed Tesla driver.

I don’t know if there were more Bothell PD out this time, or if it just felt like there were. Might’ve been a difference in crowd to cop ratio, might’ve just been the escalating situation, might’ve just been where they were standing. But I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Keep on your toes. Even here, the cops are Trump’s friends.

Anyway, that’s it for this week’s report, I hope your protests went well. Remember to save the date for May 1st, and to turn out at your local Tesla Takedown or similar before then, too. Momentum is everything, and we need to keep it.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 1.4.6 – 28 January 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.4.6, a pasteup of Greater Northshore, City of Seattle, 2 Line Eastside Bike Connector, and a little bit of King County Regional Trails to get us all the way to the south end of Lake Washington.

A screen-resolution preview of the Megamap, since most of this release's changes are MEGAMAP-specific.

Changes since 1.4.4:

Addition of a “Difficult” label on Power Line Trail
Removal of a bike store icon in Roosevelt and 84th
Addition of fully-separated bike lane on 11th Ave NE from 47th to Ravenna, and on 12th Ave NE from Ravenna to NE 69th
Waterfront Trail: Yesler to Union section now open
Eastlake from Fairview to John now has separated bike lanes, with more to come

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because it doesn’t. If you have an iPhone, please use the website interface and not the app, because Apple takes 30% if you use the app. I’ll keep doing this regardless, but you know. Thank you! ^_^

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

UPDATE RELEASE NOTICE for:

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map (now version 1.2.1, dataset 1.1 rev 5)
Northwest King County MEGAMAP (also version 1.2.1, dataset 1.1 rev 5)

The bike part of the bike and sidewalk improvements on 73rd Ave NE in Kenmore are complete! There’s still a little sidewalk work to be done – the elevated sections have railings, but they’re extremely temporary. However, with the bike parts done, that’s good enough for me to show.

Also, both maps have updates to bike shop locations (deleting some in Seattle; adding some in Greater Northshore) and there’s also word correction in the MEGAMAP box.

Direct “latest map” URLs have not changed since the 1.2 release; both maps can be download from github.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

new biking MEGAMAP, combing the Greater Northshore that I built and maintain with other maintained maps to make a map that gets all the way around Lake Washington

Housemate printed my map in tiles across eight sheets of 11×17 (roughly A3) paper and I cut them up and glued them together into a poster and got it hung. I’m really quite pleased with it. ^_^

I probably need a proper bike icon for Dreamwidth now – I write these in WordPress, it’s Federated so it goes to the Federation but it also cross-posts to Dreamwidth because that’s how I roll, and it still has per-post user icons which I kinda miss in general. ^_^

Anyway, you know where to find it if you want to grab the file and print your own. FedEx storefronts can print them all on one sheet so you don’t have to break it into tiles and glue it. I’m sure other places can do it too.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Okay, I’m calling it: RC1 is Release Version 1.2 of the MEGAMAP, the combined bike map including Greater Northshore, complete Seattle (the “complete” part of that is new), and 2 Link Eastside maps, with also a little chunk from King County Regional Trails to get us all of Lake Washington without leaving a big void presumably labelled “Here There Be Dragons, And Also Renton” as a warning.

The map be LORGE but it also be FAIRLY COMPLETE as bike maps go of Northwest King County, except ironically for the little KC-maintained section. But what that does buy you is the last section of the Lake Washington Loop. So I think it’s worth it.

Anyway, go download, hopefully this is the last update for a little bit. It should be. If I hear of new infrastructure I’ll probably slip in some quiet updates, but it’ll be less of a production – no Beta or RC releases or any of that. Just moar bieks. ^_^

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

I know, I know, ANOTHER MAP POST but this is a release candidate! It’s RC1 (and probably only) for Version 1.1, Dataset 1.1 rev 4 of the Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map:

Release Candidate 1!

This is actually a significant revision, because it adds an entirely new data type: demand paths, in the form of roads which completely lack bike infrastructure and yet are still used regularly by people on bikes.

I think this is worth doing for a few reasons. First, it shows you where drivers are used to seeing bikes around. That’s helpful, because if you’re trying to get somewhere without support, it shows you how other people do it, and what’s probably the least bad idea.

Secondly, it connects a lot of apparently-island-like infrastructure together. It shows you that sometimes where infrastructure stops, bikes don’t, and how to get across those gaps if you have to.

How much heatmap intensity it takes to get onto this new layer is highly dependant upon context. In unincorporated King County, for example, it’s all really obvious. Lake Forest Park, by contrast, is an absolute nightmare – all the roads are kinda the same, because all of the options are kind of equally bad. But I did my best to tell them apart – in part by figuring out whether they went anywhere in particular – and from that make intelligent choices about what to show and not show.

As always, feedback is requested. I’ll be dropping the final before the end of the week, and then after that, I’ll get on making an updated MEGAMAP. It doesn’t seem like making a new megamap would be work? But… kinda actually is!

Oh yeah, one final amusing-to-me note: there’s a section of bike lane infrastructure that Kenmore says is there, but Google says absolutely isn’t. So I biked all the way up there – to SnoHOmish County – and SUCK IT, GOOGLE, MY MAP IS RIGHT AND YOURS IS LIES. It’s absolutely there.

Pretty good quality, too. I mean, for paint. Mostly buffered, always nice and wide. Not too bad, particularly given the low traffic road.

For paint, anyway.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

A lower, screen-resolution preview of the three combined bike maps that make up the latest Megamap.

What I hope is the FINAL major update for the Megamap:

I decided it was kind of rude to cut off discovery park so I widened the workspace to put it back on, and discovered that also gave me the space to add back the West Seattle bridge detail so I did that too, and a little cleanup because why not.

Anyway, it’s now wider, 722x656mm or roughly 28.5″x26″ now at intended print resolution of 300 dpi (because that’s a standard here).

I really think and hope I’m done with this version, now that I know this thing has legs I’m kinda like “whelp now time to do it over again with proper tools” so that maintenance will be easier and alignment won’t be such a bear and a half. Because it will be.

Here’s the project, and here’s the May 2024 Megamap directly. Enjoy!

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

This is a link to my new Greater Northshore bike connector map, built to link the long-maintained Seattle and new Eastside 2 Line Rail connector bike maps. Since we haven’t had one and nobody else is going to connect the dots, I decided I would.

The partially-covered white map at the bottom left is Seattle’s; and the lower-down equivalent on the bottom right is the very top of the 2 Line Rail Eastside map. Everything else is this map.

If printed at 300dpi actual, the map is 24″x10.4″ or 608x264mm in size. It should fold down nicely if you’re into that sort of thing.

NEW IN RC1:

Steepness markings, measured using Google Maps data and trigonometry, with the single- and double-chevron steepness indicators pointing uphill and scaled as per the 2 Line Eastside map.
A couple of very small corrections

What’s not listed: trails on private property and some completely isolated islands of quasi-bike-lanes that go nowhere.

Corrections desired.

Finally, thanks to the other contributors to this map: