Hi Marsha,
A couples of time in the past few weeks, I've been riding down Johnson
at about 20 mph at rush hour and --- surprise --- I had to jump into
the traffic lane at this construction site. It got my blood pumping
even faster, but, fortunately, none was spilled.
The issues raised by you (and in the Bikies' replies) are timely and
relevant to the Willy St reconstruction project scheduled for next
spring-fall. As we heard in the neighborhood meeting last Wednesday,
it seems likely ped- and bike-friendly requirements will go into
construction contracts for that project. However, that's only a start.
We also have to ensure that they're not meaningless.
Steve
Rummel, Marsha wrote:
Hey All-
One of my constituents emailed me and TE staff wondering what the responsibility of contractors is to maintain bike lanes during construction. The location in question is Blair at E Johnson.
"Today, for the fourth time in about a week, the bike lane was blocked on East Johnson. Right in front of the Krupp construction project--sorry I don't know the cross street, but it should be obvious. This is very dangerous, a sudden block of a path with no warning, and heavy traffic speeding by (far over the speed limit). This isn't the first time this has been a problem with construction blocking a bike lane. Specifically as this site, there is often debris (sand, gravel, etc), vehicles, and materials blocking the path."
David Dryer sent the attached pdf files with the following comments:
"This is an on-street bike lane, TE reviews and makes conditions for two types of permits, Street Opening, and Street Occupancy. SOpening permits are administered by CE and SOccupancys by BI (for now). When there is a violation of the permit and TE is made aware-as people think these are TE permits, we contact the contractor and request compliance, we read em the riot act, the whole drill---often times they say they will comply, some do, some do for a period of time, some do not, and some repeat. TE does not have any authority to terminate a permit, to kick a permittee out of the street, nor do we have any authority to write a citation. We do have the “threat” of not signing off on a permit renewal. It is often cheaper for the permittee to use a street than to make accommodations for themselves on private property. We do recognize that in an urban setting often there is no alternative than the publics space, in those cases then we want accommodations made for the displaced
public users. They are told this. Attached is a scan of this permit. In this instance you can see the blue line on the plan that shows the bike lane is to remain open and outside the WZ fence."
My constituent responded after getting the above: "Seems to me that it's clearly not
working, and that contractors have no incentive (positive or negative) to keep public
spaces open and safe. And a good example of enforcement, review, and control being
disconnected. Can you imagine if a construction site just randomly closed a car lane
during rush hour--I'm guessing then there'd be some consequences."
TE read the contractor the 'riot act' but it does seem like there is a
disconnect...I'd like your advice on this.
Thanks
Marsha
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