Hearing the words “cycle highway” might conjure visions of Europeans pedaling safely along red pavement, or perhaps throngs of two-wheeled commuters in 1980s Beijing, when China was known as the Bicycle Kingdom.
Definitely not anything in the U.S., where cars still reign and highways normally don’t conjure anything but rage.
But the idea isn’t as foreign as it may sound.
With the Legislature poised to spend millions on connecting trails across the state — and the June completion of a plan detailing the first steps on how to build a network of cycle highways — Washingtonians might soon join those Europeans and Beijingers.
The beginnings of such a system are already in place, with trails including the Burke-Gilman, Palouse to Cascades, Eastrail and Spokane’s Centennial. But they don’t connect, like roads without intersections or highways without ramps.
Lawmakers in Olympia are struggling to find money to pay for work on the state’s many transportation needs — from ferries to highways and bridge repair. But the chair of the state Senate Transportation Committee says financing a statewide bikeway system is worth the relatively low cost.
“This is fundamentally about safety,” said Sen. Marko Liias, D-Edmonds, noting that 25% of Washingtonians don’t drive, while the state has seen its roads become more and more dangerous, especially for people outside of cars.
“We need bike lanes and complete streets, but the grade-separated trail facilities are the gold standard of safety,” Liias said, referring to trails set apart from roads and cars.
That’s why Liias ensured the Senate transportation budget proposal, approved by the Senate over the weekend and now in the House, included $46.5 million in trail construction projects over the next two years.
Those projects are $25 million for the Snohomish River Regional Trail, $10 million to bridge a half-mile gap on the Interurban Trail where it crosses Highway 104 in Edmonds and Mountlake Terrace, $8 million for connections to Spokane’s Centennial Trail, and $3.5 million for work on the Heritage Connectivity Trails on the Yakama Nation.
Though the spending pales compared to what the state provides for other highways in the state — $1.375 billion for the Portage Bay Bridge and Roanoke Lid project in Seattle and $1.67 billion for a new highway being built in Spokane, for instance — the Senate budget also foresees an additional $100 million heading toward similar bikeway projects through 2031.
The proposed state funding for cycle highways puts wind behind a draft plan from the state’s Active Transportation Division looking into what it would take, financially and logistically, to make the network a reality. That plan, which was funded by the Legislature in 2023 with an initial outlay of $200,000, is due in June.
Celeste Gilman, a strategic policy administrator with the division who is leading the first phase of the cycle highways program, said the plan takes inspiration from the federal Interstate Highway System and similar cycle highway networks in Minnesota and Utah.
“We are far from the first” to contemplate a state network of bikeways, Gilman said. “But there’s a deep and very active current in Washington history to make these kinds of facilities.”
The Missing Links
Fred Wert knows the history of bike trails in Washington. He leads the Palouse to Cascades Trail Coalition, and has helped preserve old railway lines for trail use, including the Burke-Gilman and Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes in North Idaho.
A state bikeway network is “something I’ve been talking about since the early 1990s,” he said. “It’s not a new idea. But it’s something that’s really quite needed.”
Wert said the state has a lot of trails, but many exist on their own and don’t link up. The plan, and funding from the state, would help connect them, as the initial projects in the Senate transportation budget would do.
“Fix the missing links,” Wert said. “There are many missing links because of costs, or lack of interest.”
Vicky Clarke, deputy director of Washington Bikes and Cascade Bicycle Club, agreed that a disjointed network isn’t much of a network at all.
“The network is only as strong as its weakest link,” said Clarke. “We have some really great trails, but they don’t connect right now.”
Both Clarke and Wert pointed to the Leafline trail network in King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap counties as a prime example of what the state can do.
The Leafline has 450 miles of trails, but envisions 900 miles. The trails blanket the region, and vary from wide, paved paths such as Highway 520 Trail to graveled surfaces such as the Issaquah-Preston Trail.
This impressive network owes its existence, in large part, to a group of people dedicated to making it happen — the Leafline Trails Coalition — and a detailed inventory of where trails are, or should go.
Gilman said the state doesn’t have a similar group, but that the cycle highways program would support local and regional work, and help “catalyze” efforts where there aren’t any now. The state is collecting public feedback on the plan through April 14.
Inventorying the state’s existing bike routes is a necessary step to knowing what’s missing, and the state is currently building a comprehensive bikeway database, a joint project between the Active Transportation Division and the state Recreation and Conservation Office to help determine the quality of bikeways around the state, and where they intersect.
The draft plan builds off the state’s 2020 Active Transportation Plan, which said regional “super” trails could act as highways, and argued that “investments to close the gaps” on the trails would “enhance their value.” The plan included a conceptual map of what such a system could look like, showing existing and proposed trails.
After the 2020 plan set the stage for the cycle highways plan, Gilman said she has been plotting out the next steps, including drawing a more precise bikeway map, creating standards for design and signs, and identifying what projects should be built first.
The goal is to connect cities and support people who want to drive less and bike more. Bike highways should, like car highways, facilitate movement, be of consistent quality and improve connectivity, regardless of a trip’s length or purpose.
With nearly $50 million, the Senate transportation budget is jump-starting the work, though it doesn’t fund new employees.
Waiting for dust to settle
To make a bike highway proposal more palatable in all corners of the state, Liias and the Senate transportation budget writers included a 10% tax on new electric bike sales, which was stiffly opposed by bicycle advocacy groups.
Though Liias relented some and narrowed the tax to apply to only the fastest, least regulated ebikes, he said he was “comfortable” with the tax overall.
“It’s a fair arrangement. You chip in and you get a system you can use,” Liias said. “It’s not that we’re taxing ebikes and investing it in something else.”
Jon Snyder, Spokane’s director of transportation and sustainability, said he’s “waiting for the dust to settle on budget” before he can determine where the money will go, exactly, but he figured the lion’s share would go to the connection between the Centennial and Children of the Sun trails.
The Centennial is a 37-mile trail that runs through a state forest and the center of the city, all along the Spokane River to the Idaho border. The Children of the Sun parallels the North Spokane Corridor freeway and takes cyclists from the city to its northern suburbs.
“When you talk about cycle highways, there’s really only one facility in the state that meets that definition, and that’s the Children of the Sun Trail,” said Snyder, who was former Gov. Jay Inslee’s senior policy adviser for outdoor recreation and economic development and recently toured cycle highways in Belgium.
Once the connection is built, Snyder said he’s confident it will be the “proof of concept” for the state plan because “more people will be using it and there will be more eyes on it.”
Clarke, with Washington Bikes, had another opinion, saying “Eastrail is really the poster child” for cycle highways.
“That is the trail that I reference. That’s what I have in my mind’s eye,” she said, noting that it parallels Interstate 405, runs through the middle of cities, and connects to transit, including light rail, as well as well as other trails, like the Sammamish River and Mountains to Sound trails.
“It really connects people to where they need to go and where they want to go,” Clarke said.
Katherine Hollis, executive director of Eastrail Partners, agreed, and said increased state funding is integral following the Trump administration’s recent demand that states scrutinize federal spending on bikeways.
“We need the state to focus on these kinds of projects now more than ever,” Hollis said. “It’s a tight budget year at the state level, yes, but this is transportation infrastructure that is, without a doubt, magnitudes less than the per mile cost of highways. Significantly less.”
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