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Message: <blockquote data-quote="donner" data-source="post: 4014136" data-attributes="member: 277">I'm on a city commission that deals with bike lanes and sidewalks for our town. We are a town of 20K, with another 20K of students, but have to plan for football weekends that bring 60-80k people to town. Several years ago we met with a group consulting the city, county and university regarding our transportation network and the constant refrains from the consultants and city-wide focus groups always came back to a few themes with regards to bike lanes and sidewalks. They needed to be cleaned more and they needed to be designed so that they felt safer and also so that they connected to places (continuously) that people wanted to go. The other thing that is often overlooked about bike lanes is that they (sometimes) aren't actually added for the bikers. In our town, the fire department requires roads to be a minimum of 28 feet wide now, which often creates lanes that are far too wide to function safely with regards to car speeds. Adding the bike lanes lets us eat up that roadway width and create lanes that encourage slower speeds. Another example is that we have a city road that cuts through the campus of Ole Miss. Athletics uses lots all along this road to hold baseball parking. Last year we realized that people were parking along the road in a spot that hadn't been marked as bike lane (so it wasn't illegal to park there, and we are talking about an area that only held 2-3 cars), but the consequence was that the people walking to the game had no place to walk that wasn't in the roadway and couldn't reach the crosswalks to get from one side of the road to the other (where the stadium was located) so they were crossing at random and often unpredictable places. By getting the city to designate that small length of shoulder as a bike lane (and connecting it to other stretches of bike lane), parking in it was made illegal (per city code) and could be kept clear of parked cars. It immediately opened up a safe corridor to get fans from the parking lot, to the designated crosswalks and then to the stadium in a much safer manner.Our city has also taken the approach of piecemeal additions to our pedestrian network, often relying on redevelopment to spur the additions of bike lanes and sidewalks. So naturally we've ended up with sections of lanes and sidewalks that don't really connect to anything. That is, until the area next to it is redeveloped and lanes and sidewalks are added. As you'd expect, those areas where things aren't connected are low. But once things are connected, use increases. (I'm sure [USER=6281]@CHenry[/USER] knows more about this stuff than i ever will).</blockquote>

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