Open thread: What does your dream bike network look like?

This morning, as the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) handed out bagels to bike commuters, some had a bigger ask: Finish the “basic bike network.”

This morning at City Hall, a slate of advocates from Cascade Bicycle Club, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, and others—supported by City Councilors Rob Johnson, Teresa Mosqueda, and Sally Bagshaw—advocated for a connected bike network throughout downtown. Currently, protected bike lanes exist in stretches, but don’t connect.

This means that cyclists are eventually dumped on busy roads with sharrows (just an image of a bike with arrows on the pavement), not lanes, making it more difficult to share the road. That’s especially true for families and beginners, but it’s an issue for anyone who doesn’t like riding while weaving through car traffic, or even for motorists who don’t like having to navigate around bikes.

Seattle Neighborhood Greenways and Cascade Bicycle Club’s vision, depicted in a map, shows the stretches around downtown, Queen Anne, South Lake Union, the International District, and Pioneer Square that have bike lanes—and imagines connections between them all. Currently, the only downtown bike lanes that are connected are the the longest downtown lane, running down Second Avenue (recently extended at an inflated cost that raised some eyebrows, although the Urbanist points out it’s “not an ordinary bike project”), and a short stretch of bike lane recently added to Pike and Pine.

Via Seattle Neighborhood Greenways

But downtown is not everywhere—and for Bike Everywhere Day, we want to think bigger. What does your dream Seattle bike network look like? How do meaningful bike connections reach your neighborhood? (Or do you have a better idea than bike lanes?)

Tell us in the comments.