Northwest Avenue - commuter's note

Northwest Avenue has paved bike lanes north (or northeast actually) of W. Bakerview, but there are no streetlights and few lights from houses along the way.  When I first began riding that way in January of 2009 it was dark in the morning and evening.  I was nervous about riding home after work, because there can be a lot of rush hour car traffic and the speed limit is 50 mph.  Also, the road was closed because of flooding for a couple of weeks that winter, and for flood control work last summer.  The alternate route is Pacific Highway, which runs parallel to I-5 and is reached by turning left at the intersection of Northwest Ave. and W. Bakerview, then right just past Fred Meyer, before crossing the freeway overpass.  This road has an unreliable shoulder and several rollers, but it gets light from I-5 and the airport on the other side of the freeway.  I rode home on Pacific Hwy. for the first few months until the daylight began to last past 5pm, then I switched to riding Northwest all the way home.  Oddly, the following winter the darkness didn't bother me.  I guess after riding all summer I knew all the  bad spots in the pavement, driveways, mailboxes and other landmarks.

Last summer the section of Northwest Ave. between the freeway and W. Bakerview was closed for several weeks while the city of Bellingham put in bike lanes and a roundabout at the freeway ramps.  This made my morning hill-climb much smoother and easier, but the configuration of the roundabout makes the return trip a bit tricky.  The roundabout is oval-shaped and bulges out to the right, where two car lanes merge on to the freeway entrance.  Apparently the engineers couldn't figure out exactly how to route the bike lane through the roundabout, so they used the common expedient of just making it go away by not painting the line on the pavement.

On Monday the 7th, the forward-thinking and socially responsible Bellingham City Council voted to put in bike lanes on the rest of Northwest Ave. from the freeway in to town.  Maybe they will figure out a solution to the roundabout problem, too.  Maybe something modeled after a railroad crossing would work.