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Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. How did this notoriously hilly and rainy city become so inviting to bicyclists? And what challenges lie ahead for Puget Sound bike advocates? Tom Fucoloro, a leading voice on bike issues in the region, blends his longtime reporting with new interviews and archival research to tell the story of how a flourishing bike culture emerged despite the obstacles of climate, topography, and-most importantly-an entrenched, car-centric urban landscape and culture. From the arrival of the first bicycles in the late nineteenth century to the bike-share entrepreneurs of the present day, the result is a unique perspective on Seattle's history and its future. Advocates, policy makers, city planners, and bike enthusiasts around the world can learn plenty from the successes and failures of this city's past 130 years. More than just a mode of transportation, the bicycle has been used by generations of Seattleites as a tool for social change. Biking Uphill in the Rain documents the people and projects that made a difference and reveals just how deeply intertwined transportation is with politics, public health, climate change, and racial justice.

It wasn’t the action of a single mayor nor the weight of a single moment that primed Seattle for a major shift in its transportation culture by the start of the 2010s but, rather, a decades-long struggle to push back against a cars-first mentality. Once the city was finally ready to start dedicating roadway space to biking, the Seattle Department of Transportation did not call up a concrete company and start pouring curbs to permanently protect the new bike lanes. Instead, Seattle got out the paint and redrew the lines or painted little pictures of bikes in the middle of

Looking only at streets under Seattle’s control (excluding federal freeways like Interstate 5 and state highways like SR 520), Seattle’s annual traffic death count during the 2010s was down to between 15 and 20, with about ten times that many serious injuries. Compared to other big cities in the United States, a Vision Zero Seattle was very much in sight. Nearby Portland, Oregon, for example, had 47 traffic deaths in 2017, more than double Seattle’s toll. A stunning 165 traffic deaths were recorded that same year in Jacksonville, Florida, meaning Jacksonville had 23 percent more residents but 768 percent more

The Boeing bust gave Seattle a head start on the national recession of the 1970s, triggered by the 1973 oil crisis. As Seattle would see again in the 2008 recession, people seeking ways to save money in difficult economic times found that and much more in the humble bicycle. The seeds of Seattle’s 1970s bicycle movement had been planted in the previous decades. Bicycle sales grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s as lighter bikes with multiple gears and easy-to-use gear shifters and derailleurs became more widely available to Americans at the consumer level.¹ For a place as hilly as Seattle,

While people in 1890s Paris cruised their city’s grand boulevards in automobiles, faraway Seattle was just starting to build its gravel bike paths and pave its downtown streets. As with the late arrival of the bicycle, automobiles were slow to make it all the way to Puget Sound. The first automobile ride in Washington State happened September 17, 1899, on the other side of the state in Spokane.¹ Seattle newspapers covered the automobile news from other cities closely, printing wire stories from Paris and London, then New York, then Cleveland, then Chicago. European fashion trends like the “automobile coat” and

With Seattle and Mayor Mike McGinn facing accusations that they were waging a “war on cars,” The Stranger wrote a staff editorial in 2011 facing the phrase head-on in a piece titled “Okay, Fine, It’s War.” “The mindless repetition of this ‘War on Cars’ falsehood—by car advocates harboring a phony, self-serving sense of victimhood—has led to a situation in which this ‘War on Cars’ is acknowledged by most Seattleites to be real,” The Stranger staff wrote. “Because of this regrettable specter, it is high time that cyclists, pedestrians, and their transit-riding comrades openly publish their views, their aims,

With the end of the oil crises in the 1970s came a nearly twenty-year oil glut starting in the mid-1980s. Electricity production steadily shifted from oil to natural gas, coal, and nuclear, and many old oil furnaces in homes and businesses were replaced with natural gas and electric heating. Global oil demand decreased just as domestic oil production increased, creating a lengthy period of low gas prices in the United States. To help the trend continue, US lawmakers have not increased the federal gas tax since 1993, and the tax is not indexed to inflation. That means the United States

The bicycle in the late nineteenth century was a product by and for a modern industrialized society, and many of the core designs and manufacturing technologies came out of France and England between 1865 and 1885.¹ But white settlers first staked their claims to what would become the city of Seattle in 1851, beginning the colonial process of claiming the ancestral lands of Indigenous people both by treaty and by violence. Transportation in the small settlement was largely by water in the early years. Seattle’s white settler population was barely a thousand in 1870 when the high-wheeled “penny-farthing” bicycle was

With the election of Mike McGinn in 2009 and the creation of neighborhood-based safe streets groups, Seattle’s aspirations for bike infrastructure very quickly moved beyond the painted bike lanes and sharrows outlined in the 2007 Bicycle Master Plan. Evolving at hyperspeed, the bicycle advocacy movement steered away from the mentality that “we should take whatever scraps we can get” toward one of “we should ask for what we really need.” If Seattle was going to have a bike network that was safe and comfortable for people of all ages and abilities to use, including children, then the city needed protected

First, Aubrey Knoff noticed a funny new crack in the street in front of his home. His house on Bellevue Place East, located on the steep hillside on the western slope of Capitol Hill, was supposed to be safe from the major construction work happening below, where workers were digging a deep cut to make space for the Seattle Freeway. But then a water main broke, flooding his patio. Next, his house started to change shape. “Walking through his home became like traipsing through a fun house at an amusement park as doorways began to sag and lean,” wrote Seattle