By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Bowling Green may have endorsed a “Complete Streets” plan for the community – but efforts to include bicyclists in that plan have been far from complete, according to one member of City Council’s Transportation and Safety Committee.
As the committee met Monday evening to discuss priorities for the year, new council member Neocles Leontis voiced his concern that providing routes for bicyclists had fallen short.
“We need to also provide some infrastructure for them,” he said.
Committee chairman Bill Herald explained that City Council supports Complete Streets – which take into consideration motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians.
“We already have an understanding. We are going to look at that,” Herald said.
“Who is ‘we?’” Leontis asked. “We just got through a lot of paving and I’m not seeing any bicycle lanes. If we have this policy, why wasn’t it applied?”
Both Herald and committee member Mark Hollenbaugh responded with the same answer – money.
Adding bike lanes is cost prohibitive, they said.
Hollenbaugh explained that expanding the road base for a bike lane can increase the cost of a road paving project by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“You can’t take that width and lop off an amount on each side,” for bike lanes, Herald said.
But Leontis suggested other solutions, like “road diets” and a change in street parking to allow for bike lanes. He pointed out some streets that already appear wide enough for bike lanes – like West Wooster Street between downtown and Haskins Road.
“I’m puzzled why there aren’t bike lanes there,” he said.
Leontis said he realized all streets can’t be turned into bike routes, but just a few east-west and a few north-south streets would begin to create a network across the community.
“We’re not taking their needs into consideration,” he said of bicyclists.
Council member John Zanfardino, who has served on the Transportation and Safety Committee for two terms, shared some of the information he gleaned during those years.
“For a street to be ideal for bike riders, it would have its own bike lane,” he said. But that simply is not affordable, he added.
“Over the years, I became a real advocate of sharrows,” the bike symbols and arrows painted on street pavements, he said. Sharrows were applied on Conneaut and Fairview avenues a couple years ago.
“My hope was to have as many true bike lanes as possible,” Zanfardino said. But it quickly became clear that sharrows were the more affordable option. “It’s a daunting challenge.”
Herald said the city could perhaps approach the Complete Streets idea with “renewed vigor.”
He asked if the Transportation and Safety Committee could receive an overview from the city about street projects for the year. If the committee was aware of the projects early enough, members could have some input, he said.
The city has set aside a lot of money this year for street repairs, Herald said.
But Public Works Director Brian Craft said the $600,000 budgeted this year won’t go that far – possibly just covering five road projects. Some communities of similar size set aside as much as $1.5 million a year for road repairs, Craft said.
“There are an abundance of roads that need paved,” he said.
Craft said the process is already underway for this year’s repairs, but that he can meet with the Transportation and Safety Committee this summer to talk about next year’s projects and how they are prioritized.
Also at the meeting, the Transportation and Safety Committee:
- Appointed Herald to the city’s sidewalk commission. The commission is made up of representatives from each of the four wards, the city safety director, plus one member each from the traffic commission and the transportation committee.
- Herald suggested that one priority for 2020 be the planning of a bicycle/pedestrian path out to the community center. He asked that a possible link be made with the Cogan’s Crossing development, which has more than 100 homes.
- Herald also asked that the city determine the cost of installing street lights in the Village subdivision north of West Poe Road, between the high school and fairgrounds. The development has no sidewalks or street lights, making it unsafe to walk at night.
- Leontis asked if there have been traffic studies to determine the average speed of motorists on streets like Sand Ridge Road and West Wooster Street.
- Leontis also asked about the availability of more grants in order to make city transit rides more affordable. He said volunteers at a food pantry have reported to him that some residents can’t afford the $4 transit fee. “Even that for some people is too much,” he said. “There are a lot of people invisible to us. It’s more than we think.”
