The city is ready to release its newest draft of the Bike Master Plan. They are holding a series of open houses starting Wednesday (6 PM at City Hall) to show off the plan and get more feedback (you may have seen their ad on this site).
We have posted a series of stories looking into the details of the first draft of the plan (see here). In general, the draft plan was bold and includes protected bike lanes on many key commercial streets and a plan for neighborhood greenways in nearly every corner of the city. It was also likely to be rather expensive, and there’s definitely pressure to bring the scope down a little to make the plan more achievable in the 20 years of improvements it is supposed to guide.
Stay tuned for more coverage. Details on the open houses from SDOT:
Comments
9 responses to “City will release next draft of the updated Bike Master Plan Wednesday, open houses coming up”
I just called Sara with the SDOT and left a message, “Is there is going to be plenty of bicycle racks to lock our bikes to”. Will let you know what I hear.
Still no answer or phone pickup from Sara. I called the Mayors office and they are going to look into making sure there is enough bike racks. Most of the bike racks for city hall is on 5th Ave. I know there is only one bike rack (small) on 4th Ave and it is usually full. See you all there.
Hello Jet,
Sorry, quite busy over here at SDOT getting ready for the release of the draft and open houses. Yes, there will be plenty of temporary bicycle parking at City Hall tomorrow evening and at the two open houses next week. Tomorrow night, they will be located on the City Hall plaza adjacent to 4th avenue. Looking forward to see you there, Jet, tell your buddies to come on down and let us know what you think!
sara
Open houses represent an important opportunity for citizens to provide input to future plans to fund multi-modal transportation infrastructure. The community-wide online survey tool used by the SDOT did not ask citizens questions if they would support funding measures (levies) that were de-coupled from unrelated and perhaps unnecessary road improvement projects–the kind that “forced” bikers to support perhaps undesirable road work levies in the past. Please let the planning team know and also your elected council members that you support funding streams for bikes that are not connected to unrelated road projects that are unrelated to improving non-motorized transportation. Thanks everyone and see you there.
Not sure which road improvement projects you consider unnecessary and unrelated to bicycling. The city desperately needs to improve the condition of street pavement. For us who are returning to cycling later in life (and I suspect other cyclists as well), riding on smooth pavement is vastly preferably to dodging potholes or enduring the rough ride imposed by failed pavements. Street repaving benefits cyclists and transit too — it’s not just for cars.
The lumping of bike transportation funding with other transportation efforts (the car tabs hike measure, I-1125, in 2011) can sometimes split the vote of people who might be strongly supportive of multi-modal/non-motorized transportation funding. http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/11/16/the-anatomy-of-a-successful-transit-ballot-measure/. I would prefer to vote FOR bike funding and not have it tied to controversial measures–though bikes always seem to be controversial among a chunk of the elctorate. At the very least I’d like, as a citizen, to be asked by the city in a poll (like we do for education levies before they go to the peole) to what degree I’d be willing to tax myself to support mostly non-motorized infrastructure improvements. And given I just coughed up more than $500 in the form of local county sales taxes last month, I feel I have a right to say how that is spent on “green” infrastructure, not just pothole repair.
The pothole repair (and other sorts of street maintenance) are a good idea because doing that maintenance on schedule is actually the cheapest way to keep our roads passable in the long term. If we keep deferring we only write ourselves a larger bill later for more severe repairs.
Meanwhile in many cases when we repair arterials and even highways we’re improving bike, pedestrian, and transit infrastructure. Dexter is a fine example of this. Northgate Way isn’t going to be that good when it’s done, but it will have major sidewalk improvements. The local funds going to the Mercer project (regardless of the awfulness of the DBT, which is a state matter) is going to seriously improve east-west bike and pedestrian routes across Aurora.
There’s also a long-term maintenance saving associated with bike infrastructure. If fewer square feet of pavement are being driven over, then fewer square feet will have to be repaved next time. Look at the University Bridge bike lanes. They did not need to be repaved a year ago (or whenever that was) along with the rest of the road because they were not damaged in the same way at the general travel lanes.
For Dexter, the next repaving (30 years?) will probably only need to address the two travel lanes rather than the entire road curb-to-curb. This is an investment in the maintenance backlog of 2040…
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