In this week’s soon-to-be-distributed paper, I wrote:

And on Wednesday night, December 19, the council’s holding one of their infrequent evening meetings, to go over the Office of Transportation’s ideas for shoring up safety at 14 intersections that are particularly hairy for bicyclists—including two intersections that were the scenes of fatalities earlier this year. The council already approved $200,000 for safety improvements like “bike boxes” and traffic signal changes. (Hey, that’s almost as much as the $217,500 the council’s expected to approve earlier that Wednesday, to settle two police excessive force complaints!)

Yeah, uh, scratch all of that. The council essentially played hooky today—Mayor Tom Potter and Commissioner Erik Sten were absent, so the council couldn’t deal with the consent agenda or emergency ordinances, which nixed everything interesting on the agenda. The two police settlement claims were emergency ordinances—so they’ve been continued to January 2.

Also, my plans for the evening are ruined. I was excited for tonight’s meeting on bike safety, but Commissioner Dan Saltzman won’t be there. Between that and Potter and Sten’s absences, the council doesn’t have a quorum, so the bike safety meeting’s been canceled. Dammit!