It’s the Tom Flood meme come to life. “Bicycles deliver the freedom that auto ads promise.”
Sunday, a permitted commercial shoot for Rivian shut down a section of Lake Washington Boulevard during the penultimate Bicycle Weekends open streets event. It wasn’t just any Bicycle Weekend day, though, it was also Bike & Scoot Sundays (PDF), an accessible cycling event in which SDOT, Lime and Bird partner with Outdoors for All to lend out adaptive cycles for free that people with a wide range of disabilities can ride along what was supposed to be a car-free Lake Washington Boulevard.
Readers immediately started sending us photos and messages about the closure. Bicycle Weekends is very popular, as it has been since 1968, and large numbers of people of all ages and abilities come down to the boulevard for the ten weekends per year that it is advertised to happen. Nobody would expect it to be closed in the middle, something that I can’t remember happening before. The only vaguely similar incident I can think of was the time in 2022 when Seattle Parks forgot to put up the signs…