It’s midnight and you’re returning home by bike after a night out. Should you ride on the separate cycle and walking path or along the nearby state road? If you think the answer is obvious, then congratulations! You are an offender.
Trails in King County are only open from dawn to dusk. We can debate whether a park should close at dusk, but regional trails provide important transportation infrastructure. It makes no more sense to close a trail at night than it does a road or highway. People travel at all hours, so our safest cycling and walking routes need to be open at all hours.
The good news is that King County is currently considering changing the time restrictions on trails and is collecting feedback via an online survey. Go fill it out and tell them the trails should be open 24 hours a day.
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The reality is that it’s not a real rule, and everyone knows it. I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble just for riding a bike on a King County trail after dusk. But it’s also a problem. Having a rule in place that virtually everyone ignores gives law enforcement broad discretion over who they arrest. Other similar laws, such as King County’s old bicycle helmet law, have been misused to profile people based on their race or homeless status. This is one of the main reasons why the King County Board of Health repealed the helmet law in 2022.
In June, the King County Council directed the parks department to conduct a “feasibility assessment” to extend trail hours and report the results by February. The current investigation will certainly be part of this evaluation. Council also gave the Parks Director the authority to extend trail hours on a trail-by-trail basis without the need for additional Council action. They also allowed parks to keep trails open even if they pass through otherwise closed parks. Everything is therefore in place for the parks to act and change these trail rules.
It should be 100% legal to cycle or walk the safest route, regardless of the time of day. period. There is no wiggle room here.
Although King County Parks does not control trails within Seattle city limits, Seattle is not safe here either. According to the Seattle Parks website, the official hours of operation for the Burke-Gilman Trail in Seattle are the same as the rest of the city’s parks (SMC 12/18/245): 4 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. not sure if these hours apply however, sections of the trail fall under the jurisdiction of SDOT or the University of Washington. Seattle’s operating hours are slightly more lenient than those of King County parks, but they are not sufficient. Seattle’s code setting trail hours includes exemptions for park boulevards, which appears to recognize that transportation facilities should not close at night. So why close the trails?
We need our entire region to agree that trails should be open 24 hours a day, regardless of which agency is in charge or which section. It is absurd that someone could be riding their bike along a trail and suddenly become a mockingbird because they crossed the city line after 11:30 p.m.
Seattle’s rules, which call for many hours of darkness, make absolutely no sense. If a trail is safe to use at 4 a.m., it is just as safe at 3 a.m. King County could argue that its trails are not designed to be used safely in the dark and therefore “closing” them could protect their liability if someone were to, say, crash over a bad bump maintained trail surface, difficult to see at night. But people already use them at night, so the county should already be maintaining them to be safe after sunset. Simply keeping a rule in the books that few people know about is not a good solution.