Day Three
Smokey Point to downtown Bellevue, 43 miles.
Training continues, which is another way of saying I’m not yet in touring condition, physically. At some point I’ll write more on this topic, but for now I’ll simply say that there are basically three kinds of suffering, the first imposed by conditions, the second imposed by the will of others, and the third imposed only by an intrinsic motivation to do or be something different. “Training” is suffering of the third kind. In my particular case, it involves accepting the fact that as of now, I am a bad cyclist, and to become a better cyclist, I must cycle. Conditions are good—roads, traffic, weather, the bike—and nobody is making me do anything. I simply must choose to continue, or to not, for my own reasons. This is intrinsic motivation. I’m technically not whining here, just explaining the nature of this particular suck and what I’m doing about it.
Today’s ride from Snohomish County into East King County was something of a time warp, from a place that is struggling to keep up with progress to a place that is pushing it. Snohomish County as I rode through it this morning is built for the previous century and is now a kind of frenetic strip mall culture, with aging infrastructure and too much push without enough money. Roadways for cars are paved and smooth. This reflects a regular maintenance cycle for primary infrastructure. But the whole system is designed on previous, cheaper models of how to manage shared public space. Roadway shoulders, where they even exist, are narrow and poorly maintained—crumbling pavement, trash, blackberry bushes and other nuisances encroaching into the right of way. To bring this up to today’s standards requires more than just a new layer of asphalt. It requires a complete redesign and rebuild of the entire transportation right of way, which is disruptive and expensive. Too much for a second-tier economy, which must settle for piecemeal improvements, where they are most needed, and what public budgets allow for.
As I rode south through Everett, into South Snohomish County and then East King County, the quality of the right of way dramatically improved. Bike lanes and directional bike signage, intersections designed for pedestrian safety, physical features in the roadway to keep vehicles in their place (more than fading paint stripes), and clean, smooth sideways and bike lanes, which were not strewn with whatever cars blew off the road.
Approaching Mill Creek in South Snohomish County, all the way to downtown Bellevue, was like leaving the developing world and entering our modern age. What people drive and how they drive changes. In South Snoho and the Eastside, there are fewer masculine display vehicles, like oversized trucks with monster exhausts belching fake black smoke and ratty, loud street racers. Driving is more orderly, and the quality of infrastructure, both civic and economic—even the landscaping—is up to date and up to standard. I saw this last year while cycling the American Southern Tier—the changing of epochs that we are now experiencing planet-wide, as they show up in daily life and behavior. Snohomish County is designed for 20th century industry. East King County is designed by and for people of the information age. This transition is expensive. The Eastside is managing it with much bigger civic budgets, serving a new civic design mindset. This is of course both driven and made possible by fantastical levels of income and related tax revenues which that income provides. The Eastside economy is fueled by software, funded by insatiable worldwide demand. The money just flows, and it shows up in the quality of our most ubiquitous of shared civic spaces: roads.
I would probably never notice, much less write about, these amazing shifts in our community, if I were to experience them from inside a car, or walking. Inside a car, roads are roads, congestion is merely an irritant, and my focus on driving makes it impossible to even see what is just out of frame, on the side of the roadway. When walking, I cover too little ground to see the flow of change in the landscape. Cycling speed, distance and exposure brings this all into mind.
