City needs to get in gear over offer from injured bicyclists

It's been dubbed "the most dangerous street in Seattle."

It's the site, one local bicycling blog said, of a decade's worth of "paint, spilled blood, signatures, band-aids, concussions, a ghost bike, and many, many crashes."

Now, for the umpteenth time, some of its victims are calling for it to be fixed.

Only there's a twist. The injured this time are so frustrated they're offering to pay for the road work themselves.

Last week, another lawsuit was settled in the endless Ballard "missing link" bike-trail saga. Seven bicyclists, who crashed when their tires caught on odd-angle railroad tracks, were awarded a total of $755,000, mostly to pay their medical bills. (The payout is from insurance, not from taxpayers.)

It's at least the fourth lawsuit at this one spot — where Shilshole Avenue Northwest crosses under the Ballard Bridge. All the suits claimed Seattle has let fester a severe hazard for bicyclists. Two were settled in the cyclists' favor, and two are pending.

I can guess what some of you are thinking: Whiny bicyclists should look in their handlebar mirrors.

At first blush I might agree. If I crashed my bike on a railroad track, I would tend to blame me, not the railway or the city.

But it turns out this is no ordinary intersection. Or group of whiny bicyclists.

For starters, a bicyclist falls there daily. That's the estimate of Cliff Valentine, of AMC Cliffv's Marine Service, whose office looks out on the tracks. Bike wrecks are so constant he keeps a first-aid kit at his front door.

Most of the falls are minor. But lawyers suing the city found that 66 times in the past decade the injuries were bad enough to call out the Fire Department.

Still, the city hasn't done much beyond striping the pavement to encourage cyclists to cross the tracks at a right angle (the roadway meets them at a 20-degree angle.)

There are warning signs posted (although inexplicably in one direction only.) But most of these were tacked up in exasperation by Byron Cole, manager of Ballard Terminal Railroad.

"I made my own signs, but I got in trouble with the city for putting them up," Cole says. "They said the signs weren't to code. They sit back and say they have to do the work, but then they never do it." In the city's defense it is trying to route a dedicated Burke-Gilman bike trail through the area. But that effort is on hold due to a lawsuit from Ballard business owners.

Enter the seven injured bicyclists. Midway through their lawsuit, they thought: What can we do that won't just add another chapter to this dysfunctional story?

So they hired their own traffic engineer, a respected one the city uses. He came up with a plan to actually fix the hazard, by putting in a new rubberized filler system around the tracks to prevent bike tires from catching.

The engineer's estimated budget: $13,680, labor included. Which the bicyclists agreed to pay in full.

No response from the city, says David Middaugh, the cyclists' attorney.

"It's maddening, hundreds of people have fallen here, the people who were hurt are offering to pay to fix it and we still can't get any movement," he said.

Not so, says the city. A spokesman for the Seattle Transportation Department says they haven't seen the cyclists' proposal. A lawyer in the City Attorney's Office said it "may look attractive, but we're not sure it will work."

"I know it looks like the city doesn't give a damn," said RC Williams, who handled the case for the city. "But we have been trying to extend the Burke-Gilman Trail for years, that's the solution. We're trying our best to resolve that."

Said Middaugh: "It boggles my mind that we can go to the moon and decode the human genome, but we can't stop hundreds of people from being injured at a railroad crossing."

Look, most people I talked to for this story blamed the cyclists.

But I went out to the crossing, and a bike passed every 30 seconds or so. It's obvious they're going to go right on biking, crashing, suing and — here's the key point — winning.

So why not change this routine? Take these seven cyclists up on their offer to try to fix this mess instead.

If it doesn't work, we can always go back to what we were doing before. You know, what Seattle does best.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.