(Image: Seattle Bike Blog)

By Cormac Wolf — CHS Reporting Intern

Tom Fucoloro has been behind the handlebars in Seattle for over 13 years. In that time he’s grown Seattle Bike Blog from a small side project to a pillar of the city’s thriving biking community, even netting a book deal in the process.

He moved to Seattle around 2009 after selling his car to fund his trip and biking full time. Faced with the problems of the city’s bike infrastructure he started looking for anyone who was documenting the experience of Seattle bikers.

“I kind of started looking around for someone else who was writing about bikes. And there wasn’t really anyone who was fully committed to the beat,” he says. “There’s an excellent bike blog down in Portland. And I thought, hey, I could do that in Seattle”

You can find Fucoloro Monday, August 28, at Capitol Hill’s Elliott Bay Book Company to celebrate the book’s release. He’ll be signing books — and likely fielding questions about our future I5-less Seattle

Bikes have been in Seattle longer than cars have, Fucoloro says, but he places the inception of the modern biking community at the first Bicycle Sunday on Lake Washington Boulevard in 1968.

“The city was expecting like 300 people to show up,” says Fucoloro. “And then somewhere between five and ten thousand people showed up, there’s no accurate count. And it became a watershed moment for the bike movement where it’s sort of, they’re all these people riding bikes, but nobody realized how many of them there were.”

“They’re like, holy crap, we should probably get organized and ask for some stuff.”

Fast forward 55 years, and the community is exploding in size, Fucoloro says, in part thanks to e-bikes and bike share. He describes how they work in concert, e-bikes allowing people to take rides they never would have before, and bike shares letting people dip their toes in the water to find just how enjoyable biking can be.

In 2018, Bicycling magazine named Seattle the best biking city in the country, a decision The Stranger immediately mocked them for. The city’s bike infrastructure is an ever-present topic of community meetings and bikers a trenchant faction of the city’s urbanists, their words absent the unvarnished praise found in Bicycling magazine.

After writing about the city’s progress for over a decade, Fucoloro can cite many examples of victory and defeat for the city’s bikers. Asked what progress bike advocacy has won in recent years, he cited his daily commute through downtown.

“You don’t have to leave a bike lane. It’s amazing,” says Fucoloro. “It took an enormous amount of work, over a decade. But it’s here, it’s really cool, and I think that if people try it they’ll be shocked by how comfortable and nice it is. “

But he contrasts the infrastructure downtown with poorer neighborhoods of the city.

“Southeast Seattle especially has huge gaps in the bike network, where there’s just no good route options.” says Fucoloro. “Yeah, that’s the entirety of, like, Rainier Avenue. … It’s the only good bike route through the neighborhood  and it’s absolutely horrific to bike on. It’s very scary, very dangerous. People get hurt all the time.”

“And people have been asking, demanding safe bike lanes on Rainier for as long as I’ve been writing this blog and the city’s just resistant to it, they just won’t have it.”

As the biking community grows in the city, Fucoloro says community advocates have made progress in finding common cause with racial justice and other advocates, especially in terms of education.

“It’s pretty common for people to understand the fact that Rainier Valley streets are at this much higher collision and injury rate than streets in whiter neighborhoods,” says Fucoloro. “But that was not an accident. I think that’s pretty widely understood at this point, which, you know, has not always been the case.”

“Bike advocacy is not a monolith. There’s certainly examples of Seattle bike advocates like not getting it. But, you know, I think for a pretty long time now, there’s been a pretty strong focus, at least amongst a lot of bike advocates in town, to see things intersectionally and to not just show up when you need something from a community, but to be part of the community”

Asked what Capitol Hill could learn from the city’s biking history, Fucoloro demurred.

“Capitol Hill is kind of interesting, because there’s plenty of people who live in Capitol Hill, but also like, it’s a walking neighborhood,” he says. “They don’t even need the bike. You can just walk.”

In spite of Capitol Hill’s pedestrian proclivities, Fucoloro can still cite several bike-related projects in the works, of which the bike lanes between downtown and Broadway he is most excited for.

Asked what ideal futures he can envision for Seattle bikers, his answer is immediate and without reservations: get rid of I-5.

“I’m not joking. And we don’t need it. It was a mistake,” he says. “Did you know, I-5 is only built in that location because it was supposed to be a toll road? And so they designed it purposefully to cut off all the streets that go through so that locals would have to take I-5 and pay the toll.”

“I mean, imagine like, a busy boulevard, right? Where cars move but they don’t move super fast. And then I5 doesn’t move super fast either. I mean, are we really changing that much by making it a boulevard and building housing around it?”

I-5, Fucoloro goes on to say, leveled huge portions of the International District, the story of which is told in an exhibit currently on display at the Wing Luke museum, called Nobody Lives Here.

“I would encourage everyone on Capitol Hill to look at a map and look at how many streets used to cross I5,” he says. “Capitol Hill has always been a place that is willing to try some fairly radical things.”

In 2019, Fucoloro was approached by University of Washington Press to write a book about the story of cycling in Seattle, and how it parallels the history of the entire city. After several years of blogging and riding, during which the pandemic upended his plans and dramatically changed Seattle transportation, his book is releasing this week.

Images of Capitol Hill bikes from the CHS archives

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