Bike lanes on Holly Street hide a dangerous situation. How will Bellingham fix it?
Bike lanes on Holly Street appear likely to remain through downtown Bellingham, even as city officials consider design changes in an attempt to make the ride safer for cyclists.
Bellingham added a bike lane on a trial basis through the downtown core nearly a year ago, and it’s changed the way both cyclists and drivers get through the city. There are more cyclists riding on the street, and cars are going an average 8 mph slower, according to data that Public Works Department officials shared with the City Council on Jan. 27.
“We see Holly Street as an important piece of our transportation network downtown,” transportation engineer Shane Sullivan told the council’s Public Works and Natural Resources Committee. “We want a downtown that’s safe and welcoming, that has active spaces that are thriving for arts and culture, and that requires people being out of their cars and moving and walking and biking.”
But there’s a hidden danger in the new bike lanes, which were installed May 1, 2024, on Holly Street for the half-mile downhill stretch from the Ellis-Lakeway intersection to Bay Street.
Jamin Agosti of the advocacy group Walk and Roll Bellingham said the hazard is called a “right-hook” turn, which happens at an intersection when a bike is going straight and a driver turns right without yielding to the cyclist, who has the right of way.
“They’re dangerous, they’re relatively high-speed and they’re the result of someone taking a right turn without looking. There’s definitely more that needs to be done to reduce that conflict,” Agosti told The Bellingham Herald in an interview.
Jacob Stewart of Bellingham knows firsthand how treacherous it can be when drivers aren’t paying attention.
In a phone interview, Stewart described a near collision in early March, after he had just picked up his 5-year-old son from preschool and was heading down Holly in the bike lane, towing the boy in a trailer near Cornwall Avenue.
“I saw a car up ahead and it did not have its turn signal on and I thought ‘Here we go.’ I put my arm out to avoid a collision. The car didn’t stop, it just continued on maybe not even knowing that I was there,” Steward told The Herald.
Stewart described himself as a “confident” cyclist who commutes on two wheels to his job downtown from his home in the Columbia neighborhood. But now he’s more wary around cars.
“I almost come to a crawl when entering intersections now, particularly with my kid,” he said.
Downtown crash data
Public Works spokeswoman Riley Grant told The Herald that there were three vehicle-bicycle collisions — including a serious one at the corner of Holly and Forest streets — reported from May 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025, and all were the “right-hook” kind.
“It’s important to note that the collision at Forest Street, which resulted in a serious injury, occurred on May 8, less than a week after the bike lanes were constructed,” Grant said in an email. “Also, this section of Holly Street features a standard buffered bike lane, not parking-protected. Additionally, two of the three collisions specifically indicated obstructed visibility as a contributing factor.”
Washington State Department of Transportation statistics show that there were four crashes involving bicycles on Holly Street in all of 2024, and two of them had serious injuries. No Holly Street crashes have been reported this year, according to WSDOT data.
At 7:30 a.m. Sept. 12, 2024, Bellingham Police officers investigated a “report of a road rage incident between motorist and bicyclist,” at Holly and Railroad, according to the department’s daily activity log.
Right-hook dangers
Agosti said that right-hook turns aren’t unique to Holly Street. A helmet-cam video posted to the YouTube account @CurtisPNW in early March shows the cyclist get hit by a car turning right onto Broadway from Dupont Street. The driver doesn’t accept responsibility and leaves the scene of the crash, which resulted in no injuries and minor damage to the bike.
“I also drive my car frequently in Bellingham and I’m aware of this exact scenario from a driver’s perspective,” @CurtisPNW wrote in a comment with the video he took. “It’s easy to forget to look before turning. Regardless, it’s still the driver’s obligation to yield to bicyclists on their right when making a right-hand turn. This is the law. Just the same, these intersections can be very dicey.”
How to fix it?
The danger of a right-hook collision “is inherent in any bike lane design where vehicles turning are allowed to do so at the same time as cyclists going straight — it happens on State Street, Magnolia, Champion, Cornwall, DuPont, etc.,” Agosti said in an email.
“Chestnut approaching State is a pretty good attempt at designing out the conflict. Tucson (Ariz.) has installed bike signals and red turn arrows for cars to eliminate the issue on one of their major bike lanes. Cars get a red light when cyclists have a green light and vice versa.” Agosti said.
In his Jan. 27 presentation to the City Council, Sullivan said that city officials are working on a solution to the right-hook threat. Such turns create the highest number of car-bike “conflicts” that officials saw using cameras at Holly and Cornwall.
“While we are not seeing a lot of high-severity conflicts, we are seeing a lot of them,” more than 60 such incidents in the study period from March-August 2024. “This is something we need to pay close attention to and incorporate into the design to address,” Sullivan said.
Grant told The Herald that “we are currently in the process of developing interim design treatments for the Holly Street bike lanes to address these safety concerns. We recently received survey data, which will inform these short-term improvements.”
She said that interim improvements are planned for summer.
“In parallel, the final long-term capital project for the Holly Street bike lanes is currently in the design phase, with construction expected no sooner than 2027. This future capital project will involve a more comprehensive redesign of the corridor all the way to Broadway and is funding dependent,” Grant said.
