Monday, April 11, 2011

Are Bellingham's storm drains bike hazards?

While skimming my Facebook news feed this afternoon, I saw a headline from the Seattle P-I:

"City: 3,600 storm drains are bike hazards"

Silently to myself I said, "Yes!"

Of course, problem storm drains are far fewer in number here in Bellingham, but when you ride through one, it's almost enough to ruin the rest of your ride.  So now I'm on a mission...I'm going to attempt to map all the bad storm drains in town, but I will need some help from our readers.

PLEASE send me locations of bad storm drains, whether in GPS coordinates, permalinks from Google Maps, or written description with very specific location information.  If it's particularly bad, snap a photo.  And just for clarification, by "bad storm drain," I mean one that you would feel you need to swerve around instead of ride over or through.

Poorly designed (or poorly executed) storm drains are very hazardous, especially on the secondary streets and roads that already have very little shoulder room for bikes to ride.  Thanks in advance for your help!

UPDATE:
The morning after I wrote this blog entry, I carefully paid attention to storm drain hazards on my commute to work, but didn't find as many as I thought I would find.  Maybe I was getting the storm drains confused with some of the other road hazards that I encountered on the way, such as rough roads or scary manhole covers that aren't placed in the best location.

I also took a look at BBB's suggestion, Bikewise.org, a project brought to you by Cascade Bicycle Club.  I think that would be an excellent substitute for what I had imagined.  It doesn't look like they're collecting a lot of information outside the Seattle metro at this point, but when I registered on the site and set my default location to Bellingham, I discovered that there were already a couple of people here in Bellingham that had used the site to report a couple of incidents.  So, go there!  Use it!

1 comment:

  1. Cascade Bicycle Club has a post about the publicity re. the city's efforts. http://blog.cascade.org/2011/04/all-storm-grates-all-the-time/

    They also note their online tool for reporting & tracking bike-relevant road hazards, crashes, and thefts: http://www.bikewise.org/
    Their tool could be used for Bellingham, too.

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