With the important exceptions of a stronger connection to the North side and the Northeast side of the City of Madison, the infrastructure is largely in place to offer those in SOV to bike.
The emphasis now is to connect the system to other municipalities and there are three major projects on the boards to do just that: 1. The Lower Yahara Trail, which will connect the Village of McFarland to Madison; 2. The Cannonball Trail, which will connect Fitchburg and Verona to Madison (and the residents of Madison south of the Beltline Highway to Madison); and, 3. The paving of the Badger Trail, which will connect Paoli and Bellville to Madison. In addition to expanding the system, we need to maintain the current system, which was initially laid out in the early 1970s. When the pavement is replaced or resurfaced, the corridors are brought up to current standards for safety and traffic projections...just like roads. What is the range that we can expect most users to consider for commuter biking? Perhaps the maximum is 10-miles, one way. The SW Trail was measured last year with 2500 users, which is equivalent to a collector street. Planners for biking infrastructure need to be cognizant that, while Madison may enjoy a growth in population, jobs within Madison may not be growing. We, unfortunately, need to await the results of the decadal census, which we will not have the results until 2012 but it is likely that these corridors will be used by Madisonians to commute to jobs outside of the City. Fortunately, funding for bike paths has been available since the 1990 ISTEA Act. But, a good plan and public support is required to obtain funding. Frankly, one of the challenges of constructing biking infrastructure is that veteran bikers often want to compete with cars on roadways and the people we want to offer an alternative to the SOV are not aware of the potential. _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org
