No really. It's true. According to the League of American Bikes (via the Cascade Bicycle Alliance in our case), Washington is the most bicycle friendly state in the union. According to the LAB, "Washington’s model bike laws, signed and mapped statewide bike route network, dedicated funding from the state for bicycle related programs and projects, and an active statewide bicycle advisory committee" are reasons that the state earned top honors above Wisconsin, Arizona, Oregon (numbers......

The Tour de Fat bicycle festival, sponsored by New Belgium Brewery, took place at Gasworks Park today. Naturally we bicycled over to see what it was all about. On the way, two guys in a pickup pulled up next to us and rolled down the window. Uh oh, we thought. "Hey, nice bike!" they yelled. "And nice shirt!" (We were wearing the cream of our Hawaiian shirt collection.) They gave us a thumbs up. Then......

DEAD BABY BIKE RACE: The mission statement up for consideration at the Dead Baby Bike Club is: "We just want to ride our bikes and not get hassled by the man." The Dead Babies, a hard-drinking, semi-organized band of bicylists, are holding their annual few-holds-barred bicycle race across the city tonight; it will be a madcap sight to behold. Make sense of their website if you dare; pre-reg is at 5 p.m., and the......

In the wake of a brutal tussle between car and bicycle last weekend, it's good that New Belgium Brewing's Tour de Fat, the "traveling celebration of all things bicycle," arrives in town on Saturday, opposite the carbon-spewing, combustion engine worship-fest that is Seafair, what with the supersonic jets and souped-up motorboats. So for those who favor pedal-power over horsepower, you can show up at Gas Works Park at 9 a.m. to register yourself and your......

Not to belabor this story, but we think the issue of the rights of bicycle riders to the road is an important one. We ride on the city streets every day and, though some commenters on our post about changes we'd like to see made to Critical Mass in Seattle think that every driver goes out of his or her way to be respectful to us, we know it's not true. Seattle still has a......

For the record, this Seattlest is a daily bike commuter who knows and appreciates the rights and responsibilities of biking in an urban environment. We also have a friend who was beaten by cops a couple years ago during a Critical Mass demonstration. While this post isn’t specifically about Friday’s incident at Seattle's Critical Mass on Capitol Hill, the event (and one just as scary in New York City) moved us to share these......

GIRLS WITH STRONG GASTROCS: The Pacific Northwest Highland Games are up in Enumclaw this weekend! Have you ever seen a troupe of Highland dancers, or examined any of their calves? Those ladies have serious plantar flexion skillz. And the National Highland Dance Competition's not all that's going down. We're talking pub piping, Scottish sing-alongs, a full-blown ceilidgh (it's more than just a barn dance!) and of course the field games! Seattlest's Scottish blood thrills to......

Thrilled with our ongoing summer weather, wanting to take advantage of it while we can, Seattlest hopped on the bike on Saturday and headed downtown. We haven't given nearly enough face time to Olympic Sculpture Park since it was pulled together, so that was our real destination. We had a book in our sack, and intended to just lie in the warm grass and read. Of course, once we got biking, we couldn't stop ourselves.......

HUGE AMOUNTS OF CHEESE: The Cheese Festival is upon us! This is one of our top three favorite events of the year (#2: our birthday, #3: Christmas). Several reasons: a city block full of cheese, friendly vendors, wholesale prices on bottles in the wine garden (don't buy the red wine that says "bacon" three times in its description, we made that mistake last year), and (it bears repeating) a city block full of cheese. 10......

The East Coast got two new toys this month and Seattle didn't get any. We didn't even get a Microsoft/Yahoo buy-out like we were promised. Why can't Seattle get a bike-sharing program of our own, a la Washington, D.C.'s new "SmartBike DC"? Our city has a dedicated (at times, frighteningly dedicated) cadre of bicyclists who will shoot down objections that Seattle's just not bike-friendly. If we can embrace Zipcar, as undoubtedly Seattle has, we......

Seattlest has found a reason for everyone to welcome bicycles on the city's streets. The origins lie in Virgin Vacations' (has anyone asked The Name Inspector to do a write up on Richard Branson's desire to cater to virgins?) naming of the world's 11 most bike-friendly cities. Unfortunately, Seattle didn't make the list (Portland came in at number 2), which uses five criteria created by The Bicycle Friendly Communities Campaign to judge a community's bike......

There is something seriously wrong in this city right now. The fight between drivers and bicyclists has been brewing for years, but recently it seems to be reaching a boiling-over point. It pushes what we consider to be sane people, on both sides of the argument, into a state of rage that we honestly find a bit frightening. It needs to stop (and by stop we don't mean that we want to see a bunch......

#1 on our list of events for the weekend is the Elysian Pumpkin Beer Festival this Saturday up at the Capitol Hill location. There will be 13 different pumpkin beers on tap, including the GABF silver-medal-winning The Great Pumpkin Ale. Festivities begin at noon with the tapping of the Great Pumpkin at 4pm; a huge pumpkin in which a batch of Night Owl carried out its secondary fermentation. Yum. Beers From Elysian: Night Owl Pumpkin......

Well Dan, I guess you don't even need a bike and a mountain anymore. Here is a RedBull biking event in Budapest--I guess if we can build mountain bike trails under the freeway, they can race their bikes in the subway.......

The operative word, of course, is "considering," because by no means is a bike park at Stevens Pass a done deal. But the plans are surprisingly detailed and specific, which gives Seattlest hope. The local biking community is all a-twitter about the prospects. Each year we trek up to Whistler repeatedly for our downhill biking fix (that's a friend pictured on a black diamond Whistler trail at the right), and we'd much rather spend less......

That headline was designed to hector Seattle because we know how awful it is for this part of the world to be compared to New York City. But showing Seattle how New York does something better seems to produce results (the M's notwithstanding). This time they're creating truly bike-friendly streets. It's always been unbelievable to us how Seattle presents itself as an uber-environmentally friendly city, while drivers clog the freeways in Hummers, voters kill the......

The Seattle Times has a quickie little snippet about some ski resort ownership swapping, namely that Boyne USA has bought the Summit at Snoqualmie from Booth Creek. At first we were a little concerned, namely because Booth Creek has a great track record from a customer service perspective, especially when they extended our season's pass for free after the disastrous winter of 05-06. But after a little more research, we're very excited because this is......

Our postings have been light (OK, nonexistent) this summer as we gallivanted about the western US and Canada teaching people how to ride mountain bikes. We were most excited about a trip in late August to Blue River, BC, the spot of legendary Mike Wiegele's heli-skiing outfit. The plan was to get dropped at 9,000 feet via helicopter and escort about 40 people back down through fields of granite rock slabs and unending alpine......

Today Mayor Nickels announced a new Seattle motorcycle medic team that will be patrolling the streets in 2008. They can weave in and out of traffic and get to incident sites faster than an ambulance (although we've seen motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic, and...who's going to come out when the motorcycle EMTs go down?) and other cities are doing it, so why shouldn't we? Of course, they're not going to give you a......

Seattlest's heart's cockles always get warmed when we see a bunch of people who choose to ride their bikes to get around get together, so we were predisposed to love Northwest Film Forum's Second Seattle Annual Bike-In last night. (Almost getting slammed by a driver opening her car door while riding over probably added to our joy at making it there.) Unlike most communal bike events in Seattle (Critical Mass, Bike to Work Day), the......

Our new workout regimen involves coasting down Pine to downtown, eating lunch, and bicycling back up to the Hill. If it works, we'll call it the 7-Minute Miracle! (Actually, even if it doesn't.) Often we pull up in front of Pacific Place, where there are four or more bike racks -- the kind of convenience we'd never noticed until we got pedals of our own. Today we were headed to the Nordstrom's Grill (the old......

Via our Reader Tipline, Seattlest has been alerted that some mook stole a pink Rodriguez tandem. It was last seen in Ballard on Thursday evening, July 19. Theft in Ballard! Well, there goes the neighborhood. The contributor goes on to say: "My husband and I have been training for the MS 150 bike ride and the RSVP ride. We would love to get our tandem back in time for the ride. Reward. No questions asked."......

Summertime lunch (pasta, Frascati) with our Paris Pal, and Seattlest carries on about the failures of Velib as if it were the end of Western Civilization. (Velib is the city's brand new, one-way, hourly bike rental program; see "Paris When it Fizzles" entry on our other blog, Cornichon.) When we pass a Velib "station" near the Arc de Triomphe, we triumphantly demonstrate that American credit cards won't work. Then Paris Pal swipes his Amex...the......

Some signs went up at the future site of the Colman Center earlier this week. Where there is currently a parking lot surrounded by Western Ave, the alleyway entrance to the Owl and Thistle, the pedestrian walkway to the ferry terminal and an on ramp to the Viaduct there will soon (2009) stand a 12-story office tower that's making the case that there is a market for "green" office space in Seattle. What's particularly......

As a public service, let us alert you first that traveling by Amtrak in the summer is different than other times. The trains get full up days in advance, as do the bike racks in the baggage car. (You can take your bike on the train for just $5 each way.) Then, because Amtrak is understaffed, all sorts of things begin to break down -- if you're us, the wrong part of your ticket gets......

All across the Ist-A-Verse (or at least the American parts thereof), writers and editors are in the midst of enjoying their three-day weekend. But after the week we've all had, we feel like the break is not only needed, but deserved. Just look at everything we've been doing! Gothamist headed into the Memorial Day weekend with a number of tasks accomplished. They worried about Long Islanders giving New Yorkers a bad name. They tried......

We've seen a lot of dangerous places in Seattle to ride a bike (Dexter, 15th, the Burke-Gilman) and at each of those we've either come close to clipping bikes with our car or nearly rode straight over them with our bus. There's only one place in the city that Seattlest can never remember a near miss with a bicycle, or ever even considered that someone on a bike might be a potential road hazard we'd......

--How the hell does Hugh Foskett end up standing in for Conor Oberst in this newspaper clip? I barely even know Foskett was a candidate for the Fightin 43rd's 1st position, and now Toronto thinks he's a rock star. --There's a "Ride of Silence" going on tomorrow Wednesday, May, 16 at 6:30 at Gasworks to raise awareness of the fact that cars and bikes share the road. --Bellevue will start offering domestic partner benefits......

I love this bike from Seattlst Flickr group pooler Jeff-a-roo. And you know what, Jeff-a-roo? Seatllest loves people who love bikes, so we love you too!......

As the world holds it's breath, teetering precariously on the cusp of the Super Bowl (well, at least in America), the wheels of the -ists keep on turning. Austinist was in a musical frame of mind as they listened to the new Shins album, updated the SXSW band listings and got called "punk rock" for their efforts by MTV. And an ice storm swept through the area. Bostonist said goodbye to John Kerry's plans......