SEATTLE — As John Graham rode his bicycle Friday morning in the northbound bike lane on East Marginal Way, his rear-facing camera captured a white KIA SUV.
When the SUV came to a traffic jam caused by trucks meeting a ship at the Port of Seattle, the driver kept going, by switching over to the bike lane.
The SUV passed car after car, and truck after truck, occasionally veering off the road.
The SUV passed more than 20 vehicles in the neighboring lane in a section of video that goes on for a full minute.
The view of the SUV finally merging back into traffic was only obscured when Graham himself had to leave the road on his bike to get around a station wagon that was also in the bike lane.
"I don't blame people for wanting to get to work, but you should probably do it in a more legally permissible way," Graham said.
Graham makes this commute regularly, and says he is seeing cars in the bike lane more often.
His forward-looking camera wasn't working Friday morning, but he says there were also five or six cars ahead of him in the bike lane.
"I have not once seen any traffic enforcement down there in the morning," Graham said.
KIRO 7 checked with Seattle police and the Port of Seattle, which has its own police force.
A port official says officers are out regularly, but they've been focused on trying to keep trucks moving, and will start paying more attention to the bike lane.
Graham says cars darting into the bike lane often can't see around the trucks, which is dangerous.
"I know if there's a competition between me and a 3,000-pound vehicle, I'm not going to be the one winning that," Graham said.
The port acknowledges traffic has grown much worse in the last few weeks around the terminals.
That's because upheaval in the shipping industry has changed which ships go to which terminals, and that's brought a crush of traffic to the docks near SODO and on Harbor Island.
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