At the end of July the Department of Transportation met with a group of freight, bicycle and pedestrian advocates to come up with a plan for the south end of the Ballard Bridge, which is a challenge for bicyclists.
The bike path on the west side of the bridge currently curves along the exit at West Emerson making it difficult for bicyclists to merge onto 15th Ave. The 15-member group that met with SDOT came up with three options, including creating a new curb-cut (outlined in the above photo), reduce the size of the median at 15th & Emerson and add “turtles” (those little white bumps on the road) where stripes are painted, just to name a few ideas. They then asked for community feedback. It turns out that all of the proposed options were too expensive to implement. “An unplanned project of this magnitude with all of our fiscal constraints could not be implemented in 2010,” the director of SDOT, Grace Crudican, wrote in a letter to the Ad Hoc group. Instead, according to the letter, the following changes will be made:
You can read the full letter here (.pdf) (Copyright photo by Michael Snyder is republished with permission. More photos here.)